H O R I Z O N // Sci-Fi // Literate (Accepting applicants!)

[Sir Dietary Supplement]

𝑴𝒂𝒚𝒂 𝑳𝒊𝒏 𝑻𝒂𝒚𝒍𝒐𝒓𝒔XXX


gσ unnσtícєd lєt thє frєєdσm wαsh αwαч
lσsíng fσcus thє prєtєnsє ís sєcσnd nαturє
ít's α вrσkєn lífє thαt í clíng tσ trчíng tσ mαkє ríght
í fєєl dísmαч just líkє чσu dσ í fєєl dєcαчєd


чєs í sєє чσu surrσundєd вч thє hσpєlєss
whєn thєч nєєd чσu чσu'rє much tσσ gσσd αnd вlσαtєd
вч thє hσpєlєss lífє thαt чσu clíng tσ trч tσ mαkє ríght
í fєєl dísdαín just líkє чσu dσ í fєєl dєcαчєd
maya - #872657 || marcus - #27408B


Maya was concerned about the lack of contact she had with Marcus. The two had made sure they had a way to contact with each other. Though as of right now, she was far too concerned about her own life to really start to worry about Marcus fully. She was weaving through the ship, trying to dodge as many fights as she could. Dominion soldiers were like cockroaches, killed one and she would find three more down another corridor. How many could of gotten on the ship. Where were they even coming from. Her suit wasn't telling her anything about where they were coming from. Only that she was running into more of them.

It was out of the blue that Maya could get hit by something hard and metal. Sent flying back into the wall of the corridor, snapping her head towards the mech unit that had just hit her. Cloaking device, tricky b*****d. Her back was killing her, but she felt the jolt of the painkillers and she was quick to her feet. Sliding one of her daggers into its holster and grabbing a small ball. An EMP device that one of Keriann's friends made. Toss it on something, it would fry that targets electric systems. Maya smirked from beneath her helmet and ducked down as the mech swung at her. Sliding between the units legs and slapping the device onto its backside. Seconds later the charge went through the mech and it fell motionless. Maya was kick to fully disarm the unit. Running her daggers through the metal bottle. Her suit picked up more life signs and she darted down another set of halls.

"Marcus damn it can you hear me at all," she said trying to reach him. The other side was empty, either something happened that was cutting her off from Marcus, or he was far too busy fighting whatever chaos was going on down on New Armstrong. "You better be alive you old man."

If she recalled Roisin was spending time in the med lab. Maya would head in that direction, see if the woman was still there. Numbers were important, find Jin and pray he was alive. Even if he was a 'prisoner,' he might prove his use. Either be able to shoot a gun or something else. Maya hated being on her own and outnumbered. It was different when she had Marcus, always felt safer with Marcus. The two fought well together, his brawn and her speed. They made it work.

Maya slid to the stop as she neared a corner, pressing herself against it as there was several soldiers on the other side of it. Then something else appeared on the radius. Something created by the Dominion perhaps? It attacked the soldiers. Wait. Roisin was on board still. Maya had been quick to put two and two together once Alister mentioned the Skeleton Harvester. It wasn't hard for her to put things together after that, it was her job after all. Besides, Maya might of looked into the Skeleton Harvester far before this. Curiosity got the best of her.

Maya stepped out from the corner, though had to defend herself right away as a pair of claws tried to rip her to shreds. Maya grit her jaw as she held back the Skeleton Harvester with her daggers, pushing back towards the woman and trying to even out the playing field.

[******** hell, its me damn it! Maya!"
she shouted through the helmet. "Do not try to tear me apart, Roisin," more blips came on her radar. "We got company," Maya rolled away from Roisin, daggers going into their holsters as she withdrew a pistol and three shots echoed through the door way. Hitting the mech unit that crossed their path. [******** hell, how many of these shits are there!"

Maya glanced towards Jin. "Oh, its pretty boy. Sup," Maya let out a bit of a sigh. "I am getting s**t contact with anyone on New Armstrong, its dead out there, and that's not very good," though at the moment she was more worried about them. "We need to find where these bastards are coming from and get someone to pilot this thing, Percy is a sitting duck right now, and you," Maya looked over at Jin and tossed him one of her pistols. "Best to keep yourself armed right now, just don't shoot either of us pretty ladies....pretty sure she would literary bite your head off," Maya said with a gesture towards Roisin.

"Lets not linger, you two were heading somewhere important I take it? Shall we continue on then?" She just didn't want to linger around in this area anymore, they were sure to attract more attention soon.

{[ if i need to fix something tell me. post before stuff happens ]}


sσ fínd mє α wαч tσ lєαvє thís wαstєd lífє вєhínd mє
fínd mє α wαч tσ lєαvє thís wαstєd lífє вєhínd mє αftєr αll

[Kagome SB]

ᴏᴄᴛᴀᴠɪᴀɴ ｗｈｉｔｅxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
ⓤⓝⓘⓣⓨxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
TRAITOR ←xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

〈xAND IS THIS SUPPOSED TO MATCH
the darkness that you felt???
I never meant for you to FIX YOURSELFx〉
✕ ✕xxxxxxx
〈x some legends are told
some turn to DUST or to GOLD
BUT YOU WILL REMEMBER ME,
remember me for CENTURIESx〉







Thank god he had a pissed-off cannibal lady at his side, because Jin would not have been able to handle getting through the ship alone. Róisín ran down the corridors, checking for murderous soldiers while Karl seemed to be a little cannibal himself, at least in the mechanical sense. Jin wondered how the hell those two became a team, but he didn’t really have a lot of time to dwell on it as he tried not to watch his companion murder her way to the cockpit. Honestly, the thrill of it all was getting to him though, and he couldn’t help but grin in excitement as another hallway came into view—and Róisín nearly ripping Maya apart. ”W-Wait! Don’t eat her! You guys, you’re on the same side! W-Well, sorta…" Jin stuttered. He grabbed the pistol and nearly yelled in surprise. He wasn't particularly good with the thing, but it helped to have something to protect him. ”We’re trying to get to the cockpit. The autopilot’s shut off and we’re not receiving any transmissions from Captain Blood or anyone, really. I-I can fly the ship as long as you keep anyone from, well…killing me."

x - x

For every step they took forward, it seemed like Halloran’s men pushed them back. Octavian was a silent observer of the mission falling apart, and, even though he wanted it to be so, it had nothing to do with Alister’s leadership ability. The man clearly had been a soldier, once, and knew how to inspire and keep his teams working toward their goal. But there were too many setbacks. Christian’s disappearance worried Octavian deeply, because the variables of soldier below them were too much to guarantee the GenEx heir’s safety. Nova, too, had been gravely injured, unable to continue in the rescue of Tiberius.

Octavian’s brow wrinkled in disgust as the plaza came into view. He saw Halloran, spitting out words of honor, duty, and freedom. He singled in on every word, and it filled him with anger at the blatant lies and propaganda spewing from the man’s mouth. When Tiberius dropped, the neck tightening so quickly, killing him before Octavian could even register—when the crowd cheered—and when Alister appeared to interrupt the show, only to be made into a part of it by Halloran—his blood ran cold. Tiberius was dead. They had failed, and now Alister was at Halloran’s mercy. The crowd seemed to enjoy it, his fellow Dominion soldiers stood at attention, while above a struggle ensued between an impossibly muscled man and Alexei. But, underneath that victory, he saw something else, something perhaps the pirates wouldn’t have keyed in on. Lethe men dotted the area, as well, and even some grotesque creatures, an amalgam of what was wrong with the whole picture. And he noticed that several of his fellow Dominion could see that wrong. But like Halloran liked to do, he had paralyzed them into belief.

Octavian made his way through the crowd, taking off his helmet and undoing his outer armor. The man eyed Halloran with malice as he neared the armless and incredibly hurt Alister. ”And now I take your head...as a trophy,” the Rear Admiral spat at the pirate, readying the blade, while the crowd made noises of anticipation, ready to see another evil pirate pay for his crimes. Octavian stepped onto the platform, throwing his hand out and pointing at Halloran. “ENOUGH!” he yelled, his voice magnified by the amplification around the platform. The crowd hushed for a moment before whispers broke out among them. ”It’s one of those pirates!” ”Why aren’t they shooting him? Kill him!” ”What’s he doing? Wait, that’s not who I think it is…is it?!” The sound of guns taking aim all across the plaza echoed in the air, and they were all trained on him. He looked down at Alister, utterly defeated, crippled. He looked over at Tiberius’ body, gently rocking in the breeze. Finally, he looked at Halloran, seeing his victory gleam in his eyes. “Put your guns down, men, and hear me,” he spoke offhandedly to those aiming at him.

Octavian turned towards the crowd, dropping his outer armor, and revealing his Dominion uniform jacket, complete with his collection of medals. The crowd gasped and the other soldiers became uneasy, especially those wearing the same colors and emblem as he: Unity men and women, part of Quadrant #1’s Fleet, tasked with keeping tabs on cargo security during the execution. Octavian himself caught the eyes of familiar faces, and each time he looked upon one of them they exchanged a personal stare, some of disbelief, some of confusion, and some of worry. A few guns fell by the wayside and more whispers broke out among the crowd. “Some of you know me, others of you have heard of me, and still some have no idea who I am,” Octavian began, picking his words carefully as his Southern drawl echoed around the plaza. “I am Octavian White of Unity Corporation, Fleet Captain. Protector of supply, demand, trade, and the people who partake in it throughout the galaxy. And, finally, a man of the Dominion. But I am not here to talk about me. I am here to talk about this,” Octavian pointed at Tiberius’ body, “And this,” he indicated to Alister, “And them!” Finally, he brought attention to the Lethe thugs and GenEx monsters among the soldiers. As the people of the crowd looked around, he eyed one of the men pointing a gun at him, as if daring him to shoot. “Do you see what is around you? The Rear Admiral spoke of ‘monstrous Olympian savages’, famed for their cult mentality and monstrous creatures, yet what do I see among us supposed honorable men of the Coalition, of the Dominion? I see those same monsters, created in GenEx labs for the sole purpose of brutal destruction and sick experimentation!” he yelled, causing a small stir in the crowd as they regarded the harpies, the behemoths, the chimeras that stood among them. “Those creatures were people once. People stripped of their basic rights as men and treated to this torture, this burden worse than death. And yet, somehow, the Rear Admiral can speak to you of justice?”

A man standing at the head of the Unity soldiers in the crowd, a well-decorated soldier wearing the same jacket as Octavian, swore under his breath. ”Bloody hell, White, why stir the pot now?” Fleet Captain Thomas Bishop wondered under his breath. He cast a glance at the soldier next to him. ”Keep your guard up, Senderson. I have a feeling shite’s gonna get bad soon.” Meanwhile, Master Sergeant Nubia Sylla kept her hand up, keeping her men from firing on him. Her voice was collected and wise. ”Remember, we never shoot before we hear what someone has to say. We are not so low that we force silence on knowledge.”

Octavian then pointed at Tiberius. “You watched this man die. The ‘Pirate King’, Tiberius Pierce. He is called the ‘mightiest of degenerates’, but does that mean he deserves this? To be strung up in front of you, you who have been taught to believe that whatever you hear must be true. Yet this man—this man was given no trial! He was not executed for the greater good, he was murdered to appease the Rear Admiral’s power-hungry need to see every pirate dead. And it is not to protect you—” he pointed at a woman in the crowd with her husband, to a group of teenagers who had snuck into the execution, to an elderly man with his middle-aged daughter, “—or the glory of the Dominion. No, because Kessel Station, which was blamed on this man,” Octavian pointed to Alister, filling with more fervor as he saw his words effect the crowd in many ways, ”Was the Rear Admiral’s doing. Civilians died. The people we should be protecting, die under our care because of men like him.” He spat that last part at Halloran. ”If there was to be a stain on the Dominion’s name, it is his!” Octavian heard a shot, and he felt something painful graze his cheek. A bullet.

”Someone shut him up!” ”What is he saying? No, he has a point, doesn’t he?” ”Traitor! Coward! Who are you to tell us what’s right?” The crowd became incredibly restless. Master Sergeant Sylla’s hand was wrapped around the offender’s wrist, having cracked it angrily. He whimpered in her grip as she threw him to the ground. ”We do not silence knowledge, you idiot. And from what I have seen, as well as what I now hear, I see what I have to do.” She held up her hand. ”Put your weapons down. If anyone tries to harm him again, take care of it.”

As if nothing had touched him, Octavian continued, ignoring the blood trickling down his cheek from the cut the bullet had given him. ”He wants to bring pirates ‘to their knees’. No mercy. None at all. And even in this, he adheres not to a code, but rather he picks and chooses his morals when convenient for him. For a third of the men in this crowd are worse than pirates. They are Lethe, bought with the currency you provide us. They spread the disease of drug use throughout our galaxy, preying on the good and the innocent, leaving nothing but ruin and misery wherever they go. And yet,” he indicated the Charon floating above the plaza, ”The Rear Admiral has seen them fit to protect you, to put your lives in their hands!” This realization really freaked out the crowd, and stirred discomfort in many soldiers on the crowd who didn’t know where these hired hands came from. ”Faced with these truths, you can see the bigger picture now. And so I ask you,” the Fleet Captain said strongly, ”To do what is right, and see that this man no longer is allowed to rampage his power about like a madman. Which is why I, as a ranked man of the Dominion, declare Rear Admiral Kenneth Halloran unfit for duty!” Octavian avowed, pulling a pistol from his jacket and aiming it at Halloran. ”And I ask him to step down, peacefully and with grace.”

The crowd exploded at this declaration, and the Dominion soldiers fell into chaos. No one in a long time had demanded such a thing, at least not in a plaza full of people with camera-mechs floating around and broadcasting to every feed in the system. Halloran, Alister’s sword still in his hand, went up to level the younger man’s pistol, and they stared each other down. Octavian saw the burning fury in his eyes, the absolute hatred piercing his vision. But he did not let it chill him, rather, it only served as a personal point that what he had said struck the older man right where it hurt. ”SEIZE THIS TRAITOR!” Halloran roared. At that moment, an explosion rocked the platform they were on. Octavian stumbled forward as the catwalk gave way, and he lunged to grab Alister from the crumbling wreckage. Several gunshots pierced the air, a few striking him in the back, and debris dust filled his lungs, causing him to double over in pain as he fell on top of Alister to protect him from any further fire.

”Christ’s sake, Octavian,” Fleet Captain Bishop swore, spitting his cigarette onto the ground. ”You leave me in Milan, don’t call me for three months, now you’re starting rebellions. Well, you always were a demanding lad.” He muttered with a small grin, turning to address his men as the crowd screamed and began to trample their way out of the plaza. ”Alright, lads and lassies, you all know what to do. Find a Lethe man? Boot on his neck, cuff him. Tries to shoot you? Shoot him back. Put those GenEx monsters out of their misery too, while you’re at it. For justice!—and all that good stuff.” His men dispersed, gun butts cracking the heads of Lethe men attacking the outlaws that were spilling into the plaza and getting civilians caught up in the battle. Thomas saw a particularly angry Halloran soldier coming at him with a knife, screaming traitor, betrayer, and a lot of other things that made him sigh and pull out his own knife. ”I’m not going to kill you if you stop being so bloody annoying,” he drawled on. As the soldier went to strike him, he jerked his head to the side and twirled to the man’s left, karate-chopping the man in the throat and driving the knife into his shoulder. ”Bloody idiot.” Master Sergeant Sylla, across the way, was providing cover fire for Octavian’s escape. ”Fleet Captain White's a foolish man in his own right. But not the one in the wrong,” she spoke as her men scattered to cover the civilians running to safety. Several other teams of soldiers had begun infighting as well, torn between loyalty to Halloran and standing up against him.

Octavian kept himself on top of Alister the entire time, protecting him from enemy or friendly fire, feeling blood begin to pool from his back from the gunshots. ”I will not let anything more happen to you. I swear it, ” he spoke to the pirate underneath him. For this man had tortured him, imprisoned him, and gave him an ultimatum, but in comparison to the atrocities Octavian saw coming from his own people, he could not hate the man anymore. With great difficulty, he switched on his comm. ”Please, anyone,” he choked, spitting blood away from Alister so he didn’t accidentally burn him. ”I am with Captain Blood—center platform. It has collapsed. We need help, asap.”

This entire thing went to s**t. All too quickly. Marcus did his job, he covered the crew that covered the streets. He covered Octavian as he did his thing. Still, it all went to hell. Then came the silence from Maya, either she fell asleep out of boredom or something else was happening. That feeling in his gut was telling him otherwise. It all came too quickly. The heir had ran off and silence from his end. Nova was scarred and barely conscious, Alexei was on deaths door, Alister as well. Then came Tiberius. The very man they had come to save. Hanging by his neck like a god damned display. It was disgusting.

Marcus just kept on shooting. Covering those who were on the ground from being overrun. Trying not to having anyone else die. Then came the plead from Octavian. He was trying save Alister. "I got ya," Marcus was quick to reply. He made quick exit from his nest on the buildings, the rifle slung across his back and switched for an assault rifle he too from on of the soldiers. He made a dead sprint to the platform that was barely holding itself up. His body was going to hate him for all this running and climbing around.

Marcus made his way to Octavian and Alister. He pulled off his helmet and tossed it to the side. Kneeling down next to Alister. [******** hell, we need him to stop bleeding before we can even move him,"
his vital were barely there. Marcus lacked any medical equipment on him. Make do with what he had. "Just cover my a** kid, we need to get him down to where they have Nova and Alexei, try to stabilize him. He's lost too much blood already," this entire thing was looking grim. Marcus did his best to make a tourniquet on what was left of the man's arm in some hope to slowing the bleeding just a bit. He tossed the sniper rifle to the side and hoisted Alister onto his back. ******** the man was heavy.

"Lets go," Marcus told Octavian.

Octavian nodded, painfully standing as wet blood soaked his back. ”Thank you...” he wheezed, having trouble catching his breath. Reinforcements, however small, had mingled with the rebelling Dominion soldiers. Kenway had gotten to Alexei, who had been beaten and stabbed half to death, and Ella had managed to help Alister out barely next to Marcus. Nova just looked about ready to slip away. And Christian and Daniella were still nowhere to be found. A Dominion soldier, one of Halloran’s men, rushed angrily at Octavian. It wasn’t in his nature to kill so nonchalantly, but he knew the man wouldn’t stop to talk, and he didn’t have time to do it. It was a warzone. So Octavian, pistol in hand, planted a single bullet in the man’s head. A few Unity men surrounded them in a U-formation. Thomas Bishop was one of them, chewing on another cigarette angrily as he punched a Lethe member in the face. ”Of all the stupid things you’ve done, this really takes the cake. Just try not to die, or I’ll be even more bloody pissed than I already am,” he yelled at his fellow Fleet Captain before dispersing his men to push back more people and give everyone room to move. ”I…I owe you one, Thomas.” ”Yeah, you bloody do! And let’s make it less than three months before I hear from you this time!”

Marcus and Octavian made their way to where Nova, Alexei, and Kenway were. ”We need to get into contact with the Persephone, now. But my communication is not reaching her…” he started to feel incredibly dizzy. But as it stood, pretty much everyone was at death’s door except him, Marcus, Kenway, and any other crew members still fighting. He had to push through.

x – x

Everything was going fairly decently, all things considered, as Jin managed with the help of the two ladies to make his way to the cockpit. He climbed into the pilot’s seat. It was fairly dusty, as apparently no one had sat there for a while. ”This is why you don’t rely on autopilot..." he muttered, switching on the board. There were no labels on the buttons, which wasn’t a surprise, as many Starcaster-class ships eschewed words for the intergalactic coloring system. The problem was, a decent number of the lights were out on the board.

”Persephone! This is a color-coded board, and half of these lights are burned out!" Jin yelled as he struggled to remember the sequence. After some hesitation, he pushed green-yellow?-orange-red-green? on the upper-right board, tweaked a few dials, and finally opened the computer. He heard gruesome things behind him, but decided not to turn around, instead calibrating his touch to the computer’s. He reached over to the lower middle board and pushed yellow?-orange?-red-green-green?, hoping the hell that he was remembering the sequence correctly, when the hum of the engine told him yes. He grinned in spite of himself and spoke into the comms. ”Everyone onboard—who is still alive, and on our side—brace yourselves!" Jin pulled the ship from its acceleration, twisting it around and veering it from the dangerous collision into the moon’s atmosphere.

Before he could celebrate, however, the appearance of a dreadnought in his view made Jin panic a little. Quickly, he veered Persephone to the left, narrowly avoiding a shot from the ship’s monstrous cannon. ”Apparently they were gonna blow us up no matter what," he observed, a little angry that they would just destroy a ship without wondering who could be inside. ”Well, you bastards are just a little too slow for my tastes." Behind the wheel (so to speak), Jin was a whole different person. More comfortable in his skin, he was happy, cocky, and passionate, and though Persephone didn’t move quite as smoothly as Barzakh did under his guidance, it still felt good. He moved the ship gracefully underneath one of the dreadnoughts, risking its destruction if another decided to attack, and sped away. Clearly, the Dominion soldiers behind the attack on the ship did not anticipate it being able to escape without autopilot. Checking the space around the ship and finding it empty, Jin laughed happily and pumped his fist in the air. ”Wahoo!" he cheered. ”Alright everyone, we’re fine for now. I’m going to, uh, try and communicate with Captain Blood, see if he needs help. Róisín, Maya, are you okay?" he asked through comms. As he fine-tuned the comm signal to the frequency left behind for the ground team, he thought about what had just happened. The people attacking the ship were Dominion. His people. But they were just mercilessly killing everyone, not even arresting. It left a bad taste in Jin’s mouth. And Róisín had been eating people. But, well…maybe the black goo in her blood made her be that way. Maybe it made her a monster. He hoped Octavian would never turn into a monster.

Finally clicking onto the frequency, Jin breathed a sigh of relief to hear something on the other end to at least indicate everyone hadn’t died on the surface. ”Ground team? This is Persephone. We were attacked by Dominion. I think they were looking for Daniella, but we fought them off. We suffered casualties…don’t know how many. They cut the auto-pilot, so we’re manual right now. Let us know where you want us to be; until then, we’ll be floating off-radar." The professional way to speak to a ground team—always name the ship, not the person. Jin felt right at home at the moment.

x – x

Marcus was just trying to keep everyone alive, fighting off others and trying to get to a safe zone. That was when he heard from the ship. A small sigh of relief fell from his lips. Good, they were live. Though the sound of them being attacked didn't leave any good feeling in his stomach.

"This is ground team, Marcus speaking for them. Glad to hear you got the ship out, we lost plenty down here as well. We need evac asap, we will find a safe rendezvous," if felt like he was barking out the orders now. They needed to get somewhere for them to board Persephone. Some of the Dominion soldiers were covering them, no thanks to Octavian’s words. Making it possible for them to gather the injured and get to a point to get picked up.

"We are heading for a pick up zone, is the ship still filled with hostiles?" if so, those who could still shoot would have to get ready. "We also need access to med bay and full supplies right away, the Captain is on death's door as well as Ms. Alexei. We need to get them stable as soon as we can. Better hurry Persephone we are getting slaughtered down here."

x – x

Jin quickly turned Persephone in a sharp turn to avoid a cannon attack from another dreadnought as, finally someone picked up. It was Marcus’ voice, which honestly he wasn’t expecting. ”What do you mean, lost plenty?" he asked, heart filling with worry. What had happened? He began to steer the ship towards New Armstrong, prepping the girl to break atmosphere. The dreadnoughts were incapable of following them that far down, which was a relief to the young pilot as he toggled a few switches underneath the green board. Switching to the comms-locator, he managed to pinpoint the location of the call and lock-on to Marcus’ signature. ”We’re heading to you now," he replied, hearing about Alexei and Alister’s injuries. He felt bad for them, but breathed a sigh of relief that he’d said nothing bad about Octavian’s condition. ”I think Róisín and Maya are taking care of any hostiles left on board," he mentioned as he positioned Persephone to break atmosphere. It rocked the ship somewhat with the speed he was going, but he didn’t have time to waste, and a three percent shield drop was something he decided was a necessary sacrifice. He floated her to the plaza, where he was unable to switch to ground view to see what was happening below. Hopefully no one shot a rocket launcher at them. Jin input a red-red-red command and pressed a button above the switchboard, and a loud sound reverberated throughout the ship as the bottom doors to the airlock opened and a chute of sorts with a ladder attached descended. ”I’m here! Bringing down emergency lift—better hurry! I can’t sustain this without burning through the engine!"

x – x

"Don't worry about losses, Octavian is still standing," Marcus glanced towards the pilot, he had just branded himself a traitor. Standing against someone he had tried to arrest not too long before this. Still, even Octavian wasn't looking good. Suffering his own wounds, though not nearly as bad as a few of the others. Marcus shot down more of the hostiles that made their way towards them. It was a hot zone everywhere. Any wounds he might have, Marcus wasn't even feeling at his point. Though for him it was minor grazes and a sore body once the rush ran out.

The ship came in time. Lowering the lift, Marcus helped Alister and the others onto it. Making sure everyone got on the lift. "Get us the hell out of here Jin."



۞ ۞ ۞ ۞ ۞


WITH: everyone || LOCATION: the Persephone || HEALTH: 54% - gunshot wounds in back, cut on right cheek, breathing troubles || MISSION/OBJECTIVE: to escape New Armstrong || OOC: ---

[Lysander the Poet]

Somewhere between Earth and Luna
The Inner Planets
Sol System
February 5, 2326
09:30 Galactic Standard Time

//YASHA PLACEHOLDER:: To move things along we're just going to put a placeholder of sorts. Roisin went off on her own and let Maya and Jin go to the cockpit while she went to the escape pods and reprogrammed the shuttle to fly straight into one of the Dominion's ships and send it crashing into New Armstrong, giving a distraction while the Persephone escapes. Since Lys is the only one who came to me with special requests, Alister is the only one who received cybernetics from Roisin. Everyone else had their wounds sewn up, bullets removed, and/or burns treated by not only Roisin but also Marcus, SARA II, and Ella.//

The Persephone departed New Armstrong, at speed, breaking back through the city’s atmospheric bubble. The mighty Dominion dreadnaughts seemed to finally be pulling into a retreat, their prize in hand. The frigate seemed to be setting a course for the nearby planet of Earth, referencing coordinates Nova had left them before her departure. Silence, for the most part, haunted the ship’s passages. As the minutes ticked by, casualties were counted, and the med bay was filled to capacity, with the crew finding anything they could to substitute as beds for the gravely injured. Rhia stood in the doorway, her gaze locked on Alister, his breathing barely even noticeable, his skin pale. The woman found no heart in Alexei’s pain, thinking back to her own injuries. She instead said a prayer for the girl, both to her own God, and then to whichever of the Olympian ones she could remember. Any doubt of Alexei’s loyalties would finally have melted away as she flickered between life and death. And poor Nova...she would probably never see out of that eye again, and worse still, she had lost Tiberius. Pain of the heart would be so much harder to mend than all the other wounds. She stood her silent vigil, still covered in dust, dirt, and blood. She shouldn’t leave until she knew Alister was going to be okay. Ella was doing what she could to assist, with her small amount of medical knowledge. Lissy had holed herself up in the armory, taking to cleaning every single weapon several times, just to keep her mind off of the mission. Most of the crew was in the galley, ravaging Persephone’s alcohol supply. But it wasn’t a party, a celebration of victory. Each glass tasted of bitter defeat, and uncertainty. Everything had just gone so wrong. Whatever had been affecting the ship’s systems was finally beginning to subside, but the ship’s AI left the duty of piloting to Jin, busy doing a sweep of the ship to re-assess the damage.

---

Halloran stood on the bridge of the Justice, a scowl plastered across his face. Octavian’s words still festered, and now he had to run damage control. The next person who sought his attention either needed to have good news for him...or else, it would not a pretty sight. The Rear Admiral was a man not easily shaken. ”Report,” He growled at the Lieutenant next to him, who clutched her tablet tightly. ”How many of those feeds did we manage to cut before the whole thing went to hell?” The Lieutenant looked down, then back up at the Admiral, obviously afraid to give her answer. ”W-we managed to stop eight out of the twelve feeds before Fleet Captain White delivered his...slander. Four of the feeds were still running, but we cut three of them before things got out of hand. The last feed was heavily encrypted, and we couldn’t stop it.” Halloran’s hands clenched around the support railing, but he merely nodded. ”We are running damage control on this, yes?” The Lieutenant scrolled down slightly, before clearing her throat. ”Most of the dissent is within Unity’s ranks, sir. The Coalition Armed Forces have already begun ensuring that the troops do not get out of line. The other Dominion corporations have control of their employees...and a vote is going before the Executive Board on how to proceed. The lead opinion is that Unity will either be purged of any who want to follow Mister White’s example...or the entire company will dismantled. As is the precedent...and another company will take control of its assets. There also seem to be an increase in colonial rebellion incidents, only hours after broadcast. I predict this only to be a spike of activity, and nothing major. It will be put down, and quickly. I think our largest area of concern, with all due respect, is the Olympians. They will probably not respond well to the knowledge that the Lethe are no longer under their sway. They may seek retribution...unless Erebos is playing us as well.”

Halloran chuckled at the Lieutenant, though it was more haunting than filled with mirth. ”I think you overestimate the intelligence and amount of cunning that ‘man’ possesses. He’s only in this for the money...and apparently for his lost little love. Though, it’s quite likely she died along with the others, isn’t it? We shan’t tell him of that, obviously. Would not want to jeopardize his cooperation. On to the other matters...has Doctor McLaughlin’s package been sent?” The Lieutenant gave a curt nod, ”Miss Pearson and the remains of Captain Pierce have been sent to the specified GenEx facility, with maximum security. And Mister Bernet is being sent back to his father. I expect there to be another promotion for your sir, and definitely some sort of commendation.” To be a full Admiral, Halloran would wield even more power than he already grasped in his sweaty palms. ”We won’t rest on our laurels, Lieutenant. We have a war to win, after all. Inform me the instant the Executive Board has come to a decision on Unity, and we shall assist in any possible way.”

T W O tab M O N T H S tab L A T E R . . .

[Lysander the Poet]

[Yasha_Glory]

I'm miss autonomy, miss nowhere, I'm at the bottom of me
Miss androgyny, miss don't care, What I've done to me
¤Company: Alister & Persephone ¤Condition: 20-80% ¤Location: The Persephone
I am misused, I don't wanna do, Be not your slave
Misguided, I mind it, I'm missin' the train

Róisín sat in her rolling chair, scribbling down notes on a tablet as music softly cascaded from her headphones’ speakers. Though she had long finished treating crew members for bullet holes, stab wounds, burns, and various other injuries they had sustained in their fight against the Dominion, her medical bay was still not empty. There were still a couple of beds filled, the previously bare room seeming much smaller now that there were actual patients within it. The ghostly pale woman had returned to humanoid form, pinning her hair back up in with a pair of bone ornaments. She seemed to meld right into the sterile environment of the trauma bay, gliding across the tiles as her foot pushed off and sent her chair rolling backwards across the ward. Various machines beeped and booped, SARA II was making her rounds, and there was of course the skittering of wheels as Róisín traveled about the area. The buzzing of something on the counter got her attention and she stood from the chair, her back to the sleeping patients, and began to remove a couple of vials from the machine, the dark tattoo on the back of her neck exposed for the world to see. It had been a long and disappointing event for the Persephone. They had lost so many and in the end came home with absolutely nothing to show for it. It was a fool’s errand. If there had ever been any hope that they would succeed in their quest, it was surely shattered now. Perhaps it was pity that caused the woman to remain on board and treat their injured, maybe she simply had nothing better to do, or was it that she saw this as an excellent opportunity to steal a couple of organs from unsuspecting crew members. Whatever the reason, the fact of the matter was that the cold storage had been filled with Dominion bodies, instead of Persephone’s cadavers. Could it have been that she felt some type of guilt feasting upon humans who were so closely connected to one another? She could have ended the lives of any of the people thrust into the med bay, she could have let them die, she could have followed through with her petty power struggle and refused to do anything at all; but she hadn’t. With the rest of the crew exhausted and depressed, she had occasionally left the med bay to move bodies and scraps of destroyed mechs across the ship. Just what was she planning on doing with all that spare metal?

Alister existed somewhere between consciousness and death as he lay upon one of the many tables in the medical bay. He had not stirred since they departed New Armstrong, and Rhia sat next to him, silent as not to disturb Roisin, merely watching her Captain. They had eventually stopped the bleeding, and of the crew that survived, those willing to donate for the required transfusions were many. Now the only thing to do was to wait. Wait for Alister to wake up. Wait for him to discuss their next move. Wait for any sign that he wasn’t going to die. A pair of boots softly struck the metal floor near the entrance, and Lissy stood there, her face turning almost white as Rhia’s attention turned to her. She had attempted to be stealthy, and hoped that Roisin had not heard her. She was wary of the mysterious vixen, and had heard some pretty interesting things, none of them confirmed. ”We need you, ma’am. Captain-y things, you understand. You sitting there isn’t going to make him wake up and faster, y’know?” Rhia let out a long, hard sigh, glancing over at Lissy, her eyes devoid of any real emotion or energy. Reluctantly, she nodded, and before leaving, grasped Alister’s hand. ”I’ll be right back, Alister...you better not die on me, you ********] The two women left the medical bay, leaving Roisin to her own devices. How much time had passed since they left the moon was unclear, but some minutes or perhaps hours after Rhia had left Alister, the man’s eyes snapped open. He looked around, and began to panic. He began tearing away monitoring electrodes, and attempting to reach for his IV line, before he realized...he was missing an arm. This fact did not do much to lighten the shock of waking up as such. A thousand thoughts were spinning through his mind, and his memory was slightly dim. For all he knew, he was in a GenEx lab, being experimented on.

Róisín glanced out of the corner of her eye at the scuffling of boots, paying minor attention to the noise as people made their way in and out of the bay. A slight scoff escaped her, though her gaze never pulled away from the vials in her hands. ”If I wanted him dead he’d already be so,” she half-heartedly grumbled to herself as she picked up her tablet and scribbled a few more things onto its surface. Karl had gone back to their ship in the loading dock, upset about the whole ordeal and needing a bit of downtime to cope with it all. His companion seemed less than compassionate about the events on New Armstrong, acting as though nothing had really happened. At least with all the injured people on board she had something to do. With the help of her new bot and a couple of crew members, the med bay had run rather smoothly in the chaos of their escape. She was even able to scrounge up an adapter for the captain’s missing arm; the only explanation she had gotten for its absence was lost amongst screaming, crying, and demanding for help. The latter of which was met with sternness, but ultimately resulted in some type of mutual agreement, if not only for the woman’s affinity for metallic wonders. How or why she was able to work the miracles she had were questions that had gone unanswered, though the visible marking did provide a bit of a clue. While stitch work, bandaging, and bullet removal weren’t that hard to accomplish, she had taken certain matters into her own hands. Fitting the captain with a device that could accept cybernetics and attached to his nerves with the finesse of an expert craftsman was something she made look easy as she carved out the splintered bone and replaced the empty socket with a thick metal disc. Its center was hollow and grooved, designed to keep an arm in place while still allowing all the movement of its organic counterpart. It had been bandaged up to prevent infection of the bonding site, along with the captain’s various other wounds, though it was unmistakable that what little stub had survived the attack was not strong enough to support a below-the-shoulder replacement. When gentle beeps turned into a steady ping of alert, the cyborg turned on her toes to look at which monitor was making the sound. She noticed the captain now very much alert, though he had ripped off most of the wires and was attempting to figure out how to remove his IV with only one arm. If he wasn’t careful, he could easily rip open another vein, which would require the IV to go in other (less pleasant) areas. ”Hey, hey, HEY! Stop that!” she exclaimed, sounding more like a strict teacher or angry parent than a bloodthirsty killer looking for a reason to rip someone to shreds. ”Do you have any idea how hard it was to find anything that actually works in this place? If you keep ripping out wires left and right this ship is not going to last much longer.”

Something about the voice that scolded Alister seemed to grab his attention, and soothe his panic. There was a familiarity in it, the elegance of speech, the accent that peppered each word. His vision started to focus, and he recognized some of the features around him...and some of the faces. With Roisin's words still ringing in his head, he began to ground himself in reality. He was not a GenEx prisoner. This wasn't a lab, or a cell. This was just the medical bay. He was on the Persephone . He was home. He breathed out a sigh of relief, and laid his head back onto the table, before shooting back up, flashes of their mission streaming into his head. He turned to look at all the battered crewmen that surrounded him, eyes lingering on Nova and Alexei most of all, their injuries by far the worst. He went to brush his hand through his hair, and the realization set in again. He looked down at what was left of his arm, in thinly veiled horror. Something was different as well. He spotted some sort of mechanical construct at the end of the stub, and looked back to Roisin. "You...you're...you're one of the last people I'd admit being happy to see right now, love. But I am happy to see you, at least for the familiar face. I see you aren't hiding it, by the way. I figured that was just a temporary thing." He groaned as the shock of consciousness subsided, and he could feel pain in every part of his being. ”How is everyone doing? And...the hell is this thing on my arm?”
”Well that’s certainly a first,” she responded to his admittance that he was indeed happy to see her. There was a bit of sarcasm to her voice, the only thing adding to the deadpan expression that seemed permanently painted upon the porcelain figure. Her eyes remained fixated on her tablet, scribbling away at whatever it was she had on display. ”It IS temporary,” she emphasized, ”People seem to like this face a lot better, less squirming, screaming, and most importantly less shooting and punching. It’s a lot easier to keep track of people when they aren’t running like ants from a magnifying glass. I’m not familiar with every face on this ship, but I’ve yet to cart out any cadavers from this room. At least, no one from this crew, that is. The people hung up in the cold storage are very much Dominion. The only people still sleeping off their surgeries are the ones in here, you included. Everyone else is licking their wounds in the comfort of their cabins.” The woman, still dressed in her pencil skirt and low cut shirt combo from several hours of painstaking surgery ago, walked over to the slab, her booties clicking against the floor and her stylus flickering across the screen. Something she did take a mental note of was how the captain asked about his crew first and his missing arm second. It was endearing, to say the least. However, she had already been lured in by that silver tongue of his before. This time around she decided to take his words with a grain of salt, that is, until, he asked about the device infused into his body. Her writing stopped and her eyes elevated from the tablet to look at him before her head lifted to put her full attention on him. ”That thing is a cybernetic adapter. Whoever took advantage of the seams in your suit knew what they were doing. A couple of good hacks, slowed down by the armor itself, were enough to sever the limb and shatter your left humerus. The major veins and arteries were shredded and then cauterized, making their ends completely useless dead tissue at that point. Removing a couple of inches, what was left of the bone, and digging through the remains for nerves was the best option. A brachial cybernetic would have been much too flimsy for you, and honestly those things are doomed from the start. The weight of a GOOD cybernetic is enough to eventually rip out the adapter all on its own. A socket adapter though is much nicer, can be fitted with emergency release valves to prevent any real damage to the body, and it allows more fluid movement of the limbs. A nice sturdy base for whomever you’re going to commission a cybernetic from.”

”Well, it is a pretty face,” Alister responded, smiling for a moment, before the overall agony throughout his body force it off his face. ”Much...more welcoming.” He was satisfied with her ‘reassurance’ that the corpses she was saving for later in the ship’s freezer were composed of the Lethe and Dominion forces on the ground. Another look around the medical bay helped the weight of Alister’s failure set in that much more. Once more, his gaze lingered upon one raven haired and one pink haired woman in particular. Alexei’s destroyed windpipe and the vicious scar marring Nova’s soft face...it made his heart sink in his chest. This was all his fault. Poor leadership, poor judgement....and the promises he had made, to both Nova and Daniella. Promises that he had broken. He failed to save Tiberius, he couldn’t protect Daniella...and couldn’t save Christian from himself. He was truly lucky that so many survived the horrors of New Armstrong...the Slaughter of New Armstrong, as he suspected they would call it, from this side of history. The image of Tiberius’ corpse, neck snapped like a twig, hanging limp from the Gallows stuck in his mind. On top of all that, he swore he could still feel the twitch of his fingers, the flexing of his muscles,but the arm was gone. The deep gash on his right side ached profusely, as did his gut. Halloran’s blade had not been kind to the fool, it seemed. He recounted the older man’s insane strength in his mind, attempting to fathom how he had gained the upper hand. Another sickening thought added to the pile. His eyes shot up back at the sound of Roisin clicking across the floor, and the instantly noticed her risque attire. They traced her immaculate figure, lingering at the opening of her shirt, where he could spy a pair of hands firmly supporting her, ehm, assets. Perhaps it was the lack of blood, being slowly restored to him over several transfusions, or maybe something else, but he couldn’t slyly avert his gaze. He was merely stuck admiring her figure, until her words brought him back to the world.

His comprehension of the sheer amount of technobabble that spilled from Roisin’s delicate lips was probably slower than the cyborg would have liked. It was several moments after she completed her explanation that any form of recognition crossed his visage. He eventually caught on to the last bit of her rambling, and his mouth dropped open a bit, before he formulated his response. ”Well, I suppose...I um...I appreciate it, I think. I really didn’t expect you to stick around as long as you have, you know. And taking care of all these people...there’s obviously more to you than I first thought. And I know everyone else here is glad that you’re still aboard.” He had called her a cannibal and a psychopath, many a time. He had even lied to her, appealing to her nature, in order to stop her from murdering them all. Those actions were beginning to leave a sour taste in his mouth. ”I suppose I wouldn’t be surprised if you had gone, or if you had taken this opportunity to kill the rest of us. I’ll admit, I played you like a game of cards so you wouldn’t kill us all. I promised you that Olympian lad, and then let him free. I’ve even been telling tall tales of you, just so those whom I don’t trust as much know that there are darker things in this ship to fear than just my temper. I suppose, what I’m trying to say is…” He swallowed hard, wrapping his tongue around the syllables. ”I’m sorry, lass. For not being straightforward with you. But little Daniella became taken with you quite easily...and while I still don’t trust you, or your motives, or your...habits, I can say this: you’re welcome aboard my ship, as more than just a way to placate you.” He looked back down at his arm, and then back at her, the idea dawning on him suddenly. ”What would it cost to get someone to build a reliable cybernetic replacement? Or, maybe more accurately...how easy would it be to steal some top-of-the-line one from Cyberteknik. Everyone loves to admire their tech, after all…”

The woman’s scrawl became a little rougher, something obviously striking a nerve, ”I’m sure someone would have been fired if it wasn’t,” she half muttered, the words dripping with venom as they fell to the ground with heavy glops. It was exactly what the Dominion had had in mind when they reconstructed her facial features and slathered permanent ink over every flaw. It was their perfect plan to remove ribs, organs, and string together muscles into an absolutely flawless figure that would be both pleasing to the eye and functional aboard a ship. Left to their own devices with a consciously empty doll, programmed to quietly smile and with just enough warmth left behind to remind them of their more animalistic instincts, Pluto had been one giant cycle of unauthorized misuse of a biological containment unit. The dehumanizing marks on her face indicated that she was less that fifty percent organic, which made her free game by Cyberteknik’s protocol to both abandon and abuse to their liking. The barcode on her neck was a constant reminder that she was a thing, not a person but an item, that belonged to the Dominion and needed to answer to their beck and call. The glass like sheen of her eyes, the placid smile, and the large crank sticking out of the side of her head were all open invitations to have their way with her whenever they felt like it, knowing she’d never complain or attempt to stop them. She was a toy, a tool, something that was easily chucked into the garbage when something newer and shinier came out; something even less human that could be manipulated with even less guilt and modified to their liking. There were large gaps in her memory from that time in her life, the time when she was nothing but an empty shell, but the flickers she did occasionally get, in the form of night terrors, were more than a little unsettling. She listened as the man spoke, still fixated on jotting down numbers and notes rather than looking at him. As placid as she had seemed at that moment, it was the placidity that hid a darker, more powerful, bout of fury. The quiet, bloodthirsty, wolf would always be ten times more fearsome than the dog barking out of fear and alarm. His heartfelt apology appeared to be hitting a locked window at this point in time, as the woman seemed perfectly content to give little ‘hm’s as responses. ”Well it won’t be for very much longer, so there’s that to look forward to. Don’t worry about all of that either, it’s nothing I didn’t already know.” There wasn’t an acceptance of an apology in her words; rather she was just brushing everything off as though she had done nothing more than kill a fly. She had saved several of the crew members lives, built a medical robot to patch up the simpler cases, and hadn’t taken advantage of their weakened state to slaughter them out of existence. ”Don’t you remember?” she began, ”It’s in your nature to do such things.” She was debating whether to fully explain herself again or save her breath. She felt betrayed, and in more ways than one that’s exactly what had happened. He had taken full advantage of her words and Karl’s kindness, and she had believed him. She had trusted him and all he had done since then was spit in her face while she kept to herself. Her scribbling finally ceased when he mentioned stealing from Cyberteknik, and she quickly brought her stern as steel gaze back on him. ”That all depends on where it comes from. You buy one off the black market it’s the same as something you would get from Cyberteknik Industries; a good few hundred thousand credits a piece, give or take depending on the model and what it actually is. You try and steal if from Cyberteknik and you’re s**t out of luck. For things as fine as arms and hands, they’re made to order. Precise measurements, calibrations, therapy, training; all so someone can properly grab a glass without shattering it. Even if you could steal one, it wouldn’t fit right and as far as I can tell no one on your crew is able to reverse engineer the parts that make it ‘top-of-the-line’. There are some people who can wear multiple models and use each one to their maximum potential, though those are far and in between. You just pissed off the Dominion, the last thing you need to do is go guns blazing into another facility filled to the brim with security droids that will electrocute you to a crisp.” Next came something more than a little riddled with spite. ”But you already knew that, didn’t you? No, you want me to stand here and coddle you after spending two weeks rebuilding and upgrading your medical bot, running back and forth across this ship cleaning up dead bodies and gathering equipment from my own private stock to use, and let’s not forget the several hours of suturing, plucking, and disinfecting of more than half your crew. It’s not going to happen. I’m done. There’s only so much kindness someone can give before they realize they’re being taken advantage of. Our agreement was that I not kill any of your crew members, and I held up my end of the bargain well after I released you from a pact you never had any intention of keeping. All of a sudden you see a face that was so generously donated by Cyberteknik after the horrible accident, you help me off a pipe, and now see that your crew is alive and well and you think to yourself ‘what else can I squeeze out of this stupid little b***h’? and give me more little ‘sweet nothings’ to hang onto. No. I’m done. Do you know why I stuck around this long? I had every intention of staying on Copernicus Station and watching Phobos fall into glorious chaos because a pair of idiots who thought it’d be fun to ******** with the Skeleton Harvester. I came back because I actually DID believe your lies. Karl believed your lies. And where is he now you ask? He’s in my ship absolutely devastated because one of his heroes is dead and the other lied to his face and betrayed his trust. I could live with the debate about if I’m a monster or not, I couldn’t care less about the body count or the fact you let someone who could potentially learn from his experience and come back to kill me go, I could even let the whole thing about the medical bot go; but the fact of the matter is that I was wrong and you were right. You can’t be trusted. You’re no different from any other human, and I’m certainly not going to find what I’m looking for by continuing to help you, especially if the only reason you’re willing to listen is to find more ways to twist my arm to further YOUR goals. But what do you care? In the end you got what you wanted. Your crew is fine and dandy, and they’ve all got a couple new scars to show off. You still have the free will to do it all again or choose to find somewhere nice and comfy to hide away for days, while I’m dragging around rattling chains that I can only run to the end of and snap before I’m forced back to a giant stake in the ground and reminded that my devotion to people is what formed that chain in the first place. Maybe you’ll remember that the next time you tell someone about ‘everyone’s favorite little psychotic cannibal’ you’re going to feed them to. Did you have fun scaring them? Was it nice to play with one of the Dominion’s precious toys and slam it into the wall a couple more times? A habit is something you can quit. If I stop running that chain gets smaller, and do you know what happens when there are no more links? I have to wake up after long periods of darkness to find out that people I’ve never seen before are slaughtered. Innocent people. And those are only the ones that I can see. Do you honestly think I wanted this life? Do you think I want to have to look into every person’s eyes and decide whether they deserve to live or die? Do you know what it’s like to be trapped in a skin tight prison and have your hand forced to do the exact opposite of the passion you dedicated your life to?!” Her voice had begun to rise as her little outburst went on, she wasn’t even sure if he was cognitive enough to understand what she was saying. Maybe now he would listen, or give her a reason to obliterate them; she sincerely hoped it was the latter. Her fingers were gripping the tablet rather firmly at that point, her knuckles an even more unnatural shade of white. The tension in her hand released as she turned her face away from him, exposing a bit of her branding that was as dark as night and slightly raised, the smallest of breaths escaping through her nose as she alluded to not only the previous night but also their first meeting, ”Now why should I ever expect anything else…? Someone like you could never understand what that’s like.” By the change in tone, it appeared that the last two sentences were mostly for herself rather than for anyone to answer. Her expression was still quite curt as she debated calling for someone to wheel him to his room or pop him another dose of sedative. Her voice, as harsh as her words had been, didn’t seem as angry as the other times she had yelled at the captain for something he had done. Perhaps there was even a bit of misery floating about them. Depression and Anger constantly danced, each exactly the same as the other, except the latter had twice the enthusiasm. It was more than a little obvious that the woman was an expert at holding grudges.


Alister’s head was swimming. He could barely hold on to the room around him, everything fading in and out of the blackness. Even in his compromised state, he caught every single word Roisin said. She was quick to sweep aside his apology, dismissing a genuine attempt at him acting against his apparent human nature of greed and deception. Her initial comment, the reply she made when he complimented her, was curious at best. Of course, Alister had no idea of the Skeleton Harvester’s origins, though it seemed he was being put on trial as if he did. As if he was the one who had done it to her in the first place. Alister indeed knew that it was a ridiculous idea to steal from Cyberteknik. He probably couldn’t assault his way out of a wet paper bag. But Roisin seemed to think his question was something of a lure, trying to get the response he wanted out of her. Alister truly had no such intention...but that also could have been because the drugs swimming through his system were barring him from thinking straight. He didn’t say a word, however. He couldn’t even form any words at this point, instead just staring at Roisin as her anger seemed to rise, and she went on and on. At the conclusion of her little session, she once again took that easy little stab at Alister. Someone like you could never understand what it’s like. He was barely cognizant for most of Roisin’s rambling, but just that little blur was like a hot knife jammed into his chest. It wasn’t the first time someone had said that to him. And looking around him, seeing all these people that barely survived his own sheer stupidity, people that he loved and cared about, it didn’t sit well with him. In fact, he clenched his jaw, his remaining hand balling up into a fist.

”As if you’re the only one who’s ever had it hard. Like you’ve never lied, or manipulated someone for your own reasons. You act the saint, but you’re just as much a sinner as I am. Actually, I’d reckon to say you were worse than that. The high and mighty Skeleton Harvester speaks again. Her Godlike powers over life and death, feared throughout the system, haunting the nightmares of even the bravest. Do you honestly think that little charade is going to work forever? But maybe you need a simple little pirate to explain it to you, since your vast and superior intellect seems to be too great to grasp anything that isn’t firmly stuck down your throat, or up your a** along with the stick that’s already in there. Those two weeks you spent rebuilding and upgrading that damned robot? Did anyone ask you to perform that task? No, of course not. You did it of your own volition. And yet you’d see fit to blame me for your own whims and desire. The dead bodies you’ve cleaned up? Well, I certainly don’t remember killing anyone aboard my ship recently. That honor goes to you...and besides, I thought you’d enjoy a little snack. And all this,” He gestured back over to the crew members still filling the medical bay, ”Was not something anyone asked for. I already thanked you for saving as many as you did. But I won’t let you for a single second try to make me feel guilty that you, as someone of your own mind, decided to show a bit humanity instead of abandoning us all to die. And you could have done just that, and we wouldn’t have to sit here, having this conversation. You ‘released me’ from my pact? Oi, you’re stupider than I guess I’ve given you credit for.”

He looked at her again, lingering on what she had said about her face. About how it was generously donated by Cyberteknik, and a horrible little accident. And it just added more fuel to the flames, at this point. ”You’re so obsessed with the notion that every action someone else takes is just some way to use, or abuse you. Well, I’ve got a secret for you, love. You’re not that ******** important. Not everyone in this ******** shithole of an existence has it out for you. Every breath that I take isn’t just another moment where I can use you to my own goals. Perhaps if you weren’t so self-obsessed, you’d be able to see it! Now, I’m sorry that Karl is ‘devastated’ by whatever happened, I truly am. I like the poor little sod. I see that you care about him, and I’m not sure if that’s another little ruse on your part, or perhaps he’s the only thing you have left in your miserable life. But you keep going on about how I lied to you, how I let Leon go. I said everything I said that day to save my crew from a threat. And I wasn’t completely lying...you and I are quite the same. Even in that regard, in fact. I would face down a demon, like you, with only words, in an effort to save the people I care about most in this world. Would you not do the same for Karl, the only being that seems to show you any compassion, whether you deserve it or not? That’s the only reason you came after us, isn’t it? Because Daniella accidentally kidnapped him? It’s that same care and devotion for someone that means something to you that drove me to deceive you. Oh, but excuse me. Why should I presume to judge you based upon the same sins as I, a mere mortal? I forget, you are apparently held to different standards, whatever those may be...except, that’s a load of shite. I have no idea what it is you’re looking for, and I can’t truly say if you’d ever be able to find it here...but what else would you be doing? Murdering whomever you wished in the streets of some dark, dank station, because you feel you have the right to decide whether someone deserves to be alive? Whatever these chains are that bind you, it has nothing to do with me. It’s your own problem!”

Alister took a breath, before he went on. His voice was raised as well, even louder than Roisin’s had been. His angry gave him clarity, and some were beginning to stir in the medical bay. ”And I should have assumed you couldn’t handle a bit of humor either, your Godliness. I joke about how a beast of nightmare lurks within to a few prisoners and some traitorous fool, and you take it as a personal attack? As some kind of manipulation? It truly isn’t that. I was merely being honest with them...there really is a monster lurking aboard this ship, awaiting easy prey. I did not intend to play with you. It isn’t as if I asked you to eat them if they got out of line. And I did not presume to give you orders. You may not have wanted whatever life you have now, but you aren’t the only person to ever have a different life, a horrible life, thrust upon them and have to adjust to its horrors. And by no means should you retain the delusion that your struggle gives you any right to decide if anyone should live or die. Oh, and since you asked...perhaps I know more about being trapped within my own prison than you think. Unless you really think I wanted to become a pirate, drifting through space on a chunk of metal, eeking out a meager existence. My life was different once, just as I assume yours was. I had a family, perhaps a bright future. Until my father and sister were taken from me, by Olympians. So I followed what I believe in, and I became a soldier. And I didn’t fight for the foul Dominion. I had no idea they pulled our strings. I fought for the Coalition, for the only bastion of Democracy that existed in the cold dark of our solar system. It was by the Dominion that I was deceived. Their secret goals and dealings cost me not only my future...they killed anyone who trusted me, who was my friend, who stood up in my defense. They would have imprisoned me, tortured me, and done who knows what. After I escape, I spent months, being used, and abused by the crew of many ships and their Captains...Rhia and I both. I watched the last person in the universe that I could believe in descend into madness, threatening to murder me right there for another dose of whatever narcotic she could afford with the credits on my corpse. Every single day of my life since then has been on the run. From the Dominion, from Halloran, from that betrayal. I’m not a pirate for the glory and the riches, which as you can see, I have neither. I’m a pirate out of necessity. Deceit is just another tool that helps me stay alive. Perhaps lying to you seems like poor judgement, or manipulation, but at least nobody else had to die. I still bear the weight of the ones I can’t save, every day. Like the man you killed, Gunnar Davis, the doctor. I wear his old dog tags, along with all the others who’ve died in my name, or because of my actions. Those we lost today, I will do the same, bearing the burden of knowing I killed them. I failed them, and now we’re broken. I lost Daniella, whom I swore against all to protect...someone that you and I both know to be special for a myriad of reasons. You aren’t the only one to suffer, at the hands of the Dominion, or anyone else! I’m sorry for lying to you, and for whatever other imaginary crimes I’ve committed against you, but I would do it all again if it still saved these lives!” His heart was racing, his angered had welled up, but now, at the conclusion, he was beginning to feel...light. His vision began to fade, and he fell back onto the table, consciousness leaving him.

The woman, still pretty peeved, listened to the captain's shouting, remaining quiet through the ordeal although she could have interjected her protests and explanations for all the missing details he hadn't seemed to take into consideration. There were certainly a few things spat out that cut her deep, plucking just the right nerves to keep her tongue trapped tightly in her mouth. There was something almost omniscient in her gaze, like she was saying 'this is exactly what I was talking about'. It wasn't full on rage or a teary eyed derailment into uncontrollable sobbing. It was jaded, empty, like someone completely used to the abuse and able to go numb to deal with the situation. When all the screaming was out of his system and he passed back out onto the table all that escaped the woman's lips was a scoff, ”Tch... Get him out of here, he'll be fine in his cabin with that last blood pack." She picked up her stylus and went back to her rounds, checking and dismissing the crew members that had began to stir from the captain's rage.

-x-

About a week or so had passed since Roisin had Alister carted back to his quarters. When he had first awoken, he could barely get himself to stand, much less do anything else. Their little argument still blared in his mind, making his blood come close to boiling. He had attempted to be grateful for her assistance, attempted to show genuine regret for his deceitful actions, and she merely turned it around on him, making vile assumptions about him, and humanity as a whole. It became apparent from this, and her subtle hints, that there wasn’t anything truly human left about her...at least not that she wanted anyone to see. Perhaps she even forgot it was there. Maybe even to her, as for everyone else, there was only the monster. Alister sure believed that may be the case. Still, somewhere in his shattered conscience, he felt sorry for that vicious creature. She had effectively saved his life, and gave him at least an opportunity to recover what he had lost. Every time he had attempted to maneuver his arm for some task, he looked sorrowfully to the stub, and thought of Roisin. It had hardly occurred to him before, drug addled and furious, that she could probably construct a suitable attachment, seeing as she had constructed the port from whatever parts she had. Not that she’d be willing, as she had said, feeling that he had attempted to manipulate her into doing so. He hadn’t spoken to her since then. Hell, he hadn’t spoken to anyone. He spent the entire time holed up in his quarters, refusing to face his crew. The shame of his failure was far too much to bare, and he could not look at those faces without it haunting him that much more. Rhia was capable enough to be in charge, and she had a good lot to choose from if she needed anything done. Alister was resigned to just rotting away, wallowing in his sorrow, brooding over his failure. Whenever he closed his eyes, he saw Halloran...he felt the blade cleaving away his arm. He imagined Daniella, being taken back to GenEx. Nova’s scarred face stared at him, one blank eye, refusing to let him live down his broken promises. Alexei laid out in front of him, broken and dying, Kenway kneeling next to her, staring daggers into his heart. He had forced himself, every single day, to watch the recorded broadcast of the assault, over and over. He watched as everything collapsed around him. He learned of Octavian’s unexpected role, sparking a true revolution. Even the Dominion defector was more fit to lead this crew than he was. Octavian too, as unexpected as it seemed, had a hand in saving his life. Alister knew that Jin had piloted the ship while Persephone was unable to, even though he could have flown anywhere, though his loyalty to Octavian clearly spoke against that option. He hadn’t shaved or cut his hair the entire time, and he was beginning to look unkempt. He managed to crawl in and out of the shower each morning, spending countless hours letting the water scorch his skin, attempting to burn away the pain of his sins. When he wasn’t doing that, he merely sat there, staring into nothing, dwelling. Now that Halloran had won, what point was there to keep fighting? What did it matter, if he succeeded in killing all the pirates, and the Dominion gained their upper hand, crushing the Olympians? And if they finally squashed out the last true remnants of the Coalition...who cared? It was obviously destined to happen, and the unstoppable tide of the Dominion would go out to seize every star within sight. Their rebels in Unity, they would crush. Anyone else who spoke out of line, executed to perpetuate fear. A sudden, sharp pain caused Alister to groan. He had stopped taking any sort of drugs, letting the pain wrack his entire form. He’d rather suffer than go before Roisin again. He didn’t feel he needed another scolding so soon. The ship had landed on Earth, or so Persephone had informed him. Nova’s coordinates carried them to their destination. Whomever her mystery mechanic was that would be fixing the ship. He knew nothing of the repair effort, or where they even were. And he didn’t really care.

Róisín, dressed as nicely as ever, had holed up in the medical bay nearly round the clock. One by one more people had left, some needing a little extra care, others finally convinced to come by and get their wounds checked before infections spread and worsened. The initial thought of being in the hands of a monster was off putting, but as more and more people showed up unharmed, several gained a bit more confidence to travel into the medical bay for care. A couple of crew hands were scolded for waiting so long and letting minor wounds flare into problems, others were in and out in mere minutes without so much as a single word from their enchanting, temporary, nurse. SARA II had been ordered to make rounds on the ship and check the crew that had already been patched for a couple of days and either needed a checkup or bandage change. The only one who hadn’t returned to the bay was the ever temperamental captain. After he had been carted out of the room and reunited with a proper bed, the woman had gone back to doing the exact same routine, without so much as a word as to why the shouting had started in the first place. Perhaps that was how she coped with things, by simply retreating into her shell and appearing completely indifferent to the insults and harsh words. It wasn’t until Persy flickered into the medical bay and asked her to check on the captain that Róisín voiced any sort of discomfort. She knew she had seen a couple others with basic medical knowledge onboard; surely they could take care of cleaning a couple of wounds and replacing gauze, couldn’t they? The problematic portions came from the port on his left shoulder. Nobody knew how to handle a meld of inorganic material into human skin or look for problems associated with that type of healing process. Nobody that is, except Róisín. Had Persy been made of flesh and blood like everyone else, Róisín would have outright refused. The AI, however, was very well liked by the Skeleton Harvester, if only because she wasn’t alive and had helped her several times despite not being a member of her crew. There was a couple of murmured protests as the woman tied her hair up in a ponytail, her mismatched bangs feathering and framing her face. The only way she wasn’t going to immediately punch him in the face was if she was calm and collected, and that was only going to come from the solitude a set of noise cancelling headphones offered, a pair of which she picked up and quickly set to a random station as she gathered up her things. She took a small medical first aid kit from the shelf and placed a couple of instruments within it, knowing full well she would more than likely have to sedate him to get anything done, otherwise he’d just spit in her face or remind her of how she didn’t belong amongst other humans anymore. At least, that was what she assumed would come of all their meetings. Zipping up the bag she grabbed the handle and waltzed out of the room, heading straight for the captain’s quarters after getting directions from Persy. The door was luckily unlocked, allowing the slender woman to slip inside and remove her headphones, a song slinking from its speakers as they cupped around her neck, in time to hear sounds of agony coming from the captain. Well at least that answered her question of if he was awake or not. She watched him for a bit, noticing his behavior, before finally speaking. ”We can do this the easy way, or the hard way, your choice,” she sighed, raising the first aid kit so he would hopefully know what was about to happen.

Something resembling a grunt seemed to escape Alister’s lips, albeit a pained one. This was the greeting he gave to whomever decided it would be a good idea to visit the broken man. He hadn’t bothered locking the door. He never said anything to anyone. In truth, Persy had been the one keeping everyone else away. She may not have been human, but she comprehended that his mental and emotional states were not ideal for receiving guests. The one exception was Roisin, as she would need to provide her medical and cybernetic expertise to assist the Captain. He didn’t even look back to see who had entered his domain, but after a moment, the subtle sound of music, the way her feet fell on the deck, and then finally that familiar, oddly sweet voice told Alister all he needed to know. His mind flashed through their little conflict, and when he spoke, it seemed with a tone of surprise. ”I didn’t expect you to be coming to see me, at all. Figured you’d just let me rot in here...not that I’d object.” He shifted his body, turning to look back at her, and locked his jaws together as another flare of pain coursed through his body. He saw the first aid kit in her hand, and sighed. It seemed as if he would resign to the simple way of doing this. ”Go ahead. I’ll try not to be too much trouble. Just do what you’ve got to do.” He sat completely still, waiting for Roisin to perform her business. Alister hoped it was simply just to change some bandages and ensure that he was alright, but after their argument, he still wouldn’t have put it past her to sedate him, snag a few of his organs, and leave him even more worthless than he already was, just for a good time. He supposed it would be some odd kind of justice, after lying to her in such magnitude. It would only be fair that he would be the meal that replaced the one that got away. As he had done many times before, he went to use his left arm, only to remember that nothing remained. At least he was lucky enough to not lose his dominant hand.

And I don't know where I've been, And I don't know what I'm into, And I don't know what I've done to me
And as I watch you disappear into the ground, My one mistake was that I never let you down
So I'll waste my time and I'll burn my mind, On miss nothing, miss everything

[Lysander the Poet]

ｌｏｃａｔｉｏｎ: Alister's Cabin // Cargo Bay, Persephone.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxｃｏｍｐａｎｙ: Roisin.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxｓｔａｔｕｓ: 60% - All wounds sutured and bandaged, left arm capped with cybernetic adapter. Emotionally broken and disheartened

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxｍｕｓｉｃ: Behind Blue Eyes - Limp Bizkit cover

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”Don’t think too deeply into it, Blood. I’m only here because Persy asked me to check on you personally. If I had wanted you to rot then I would have left you bleeding on a metal slab.” The woman closed the door behind her, walking on her toes, one foot at a time, over to the captain’s bedside and placing the bag on an empty spot of mattress. Polished fingers, each with a couple of old scars, unzipped the bag and dug around inside for a small vial of semi-transparent plastic. It looked bulbous and thick, like the top of a bottle of nasal spray, yet was still small enough to be carried between two fingers. ”You’re running out of pain medication, and needles for that matter, so you’ll have to snort this. I diluted one of my toxins into a vaporized form, seems to be working rather well to take the edge off everyone’s injuries.” When his hand never rose to take the applicator from her she sighed and rolled her eyes, taking it upon herself to grab his chin and force the top of the device into one of his nostrils, releasing the spray as quickly as she could and letting his head fall back to wherever it wished. The medication wouldn’t knock him out, or be as fast acting as an actual injection, nevertheless the moist membrane of the nose and sinus cavities would absorb the drug into his system, regardless of if he did or didn’t want it. She pushed the tiny empty vial into a side pocket of the medical bag and began to roll up his left sleeve until she could see his bandages, old and off-white, some even speckled with blood. She paused for a moment, chewing on the inside of her lip as though something were making the cogs in her head begin to spin. She knew it was going to hurt to lift off the gauze after a couple days of letting it sit atop healing skin that had most likely attached itself to the soft fibers. She even considered warning him that it would sting, until she remembered what had gone on during their last couple of meetings. Nah, he’d be juuuuust fine. She began to undo the wrapping, her fingers becoming slower and more cautious the closer she got to his skin, gently lifting the mesh fabric from the surgical site and pulling the old bandages from his shoulder to get them out of her way. Opening up an alcohol wipe from the emergency kit she started cleaning up the stitches, her fingers occasionally pressing against his bare skin as trained eyes focused and searched for any signs of infection or allergic reaction to the metal. Without taking her gaze from his arm, or pausing for a break from the fine detailed cleaning, she asked, ”Do you want me to take it off?”

After Alister's clear unwillingness to administer his own medication, Roisin seemed to have chosen the hard way for him. Her touch didn't seem unnecessarily rough as she forced the medication up into his nose. He took it less than gracefully, finding the action of being stabbed with a needle much more preferable. Still, the diluted toxin began acting quickly as his mucous membranes absorbed it. His pain slowly began to subside. He flinched, mostly out of reflex, as Roisin rolled up his sleeve, only feeling minor discomfort as she unwrapped the bandages around his stump. He pondered her question for a moment as she worked, frowning as he considered it. "Would it really matter, either way. It's not as if the damned stump is going to be of any use. Just like me, the arm has become useless. Frankly, I'm not sure I would care if the rest of it rotted the ******** off. At least you had the forethought to give it the capacity of a purpose. But as you made perfectly clear...unless I found someone willing and able to design a cybernetic for it, I very well ********] He managed to refrain from squirming as she worked, even at the times that he found the experience uncomfortable. As the moments passed, his physical discomfort was coupled with the silence, and it made it that much worse. Finally, he decided to take something of a gamble, and spoke. "So, I know a small bit about the feared Skeleton Harvester...but who is this Roisin you masquerade around as. You spoke of...some interesting things when last we spoke. Of your face, of your life...it was perplexing, to be sure. The nature of your hunger, it's not natural...and your tattoo...the markings on your face..."

”Well if I take it off you won’t have enough nerves to get a fully functional cybernetic. You’d be stuck with a prosthetic at best, which take about five minutes to firmly grasp a cup and just dangle when not in use. Their technology is archaic, but still practical for someone who doesn’t want or need to use their limbs very much. Yours is NOT useless. I’m sure you’d care if you woke up to something eating you alive so in that regard your adapter IS serving a purpose. Even if you don’t find someone to make you an arm, you’re still a pirate. Just bend a metal clothes hanger, shove it in there, and call it a hook.” There was the ever faithful sarcasm that salted her elegant accent. While she caught on to the miserable mulling the captain had been spewing since she entered the room, there was still that part of her that told her to keep him at an arm’s length. He had seemed so genuinely sincere the first time around, and so very passionate that what he was doing was for the good of his crew. She was still quite angry about it all; however, there was something that had cut a little deeper than his betrayal. It was a disappointment that flowed in the empty space her anger created. Every fiber in her being had told her to not trust pirates; her brain had screamed out all the ways she didn’t need to agree to any of their terms, the monster in her demanded their heads on a platter for ruining her plans and stealing Karl, and yet her heart had pondered, ‘what if’s. That quiet little voice which rarely spoke to her had clawed its way to the top so it could be heard over its more powerful counterparts. She had listened to it, knowing fully well that it wasn’t the smartest choice. They had given her a way out and instead she had stuck around in hopes that something would be different. Now that her instincts had been proven right, the woman found it hard to forgive and forget what had happened. The tender buzzing of music kept the room from being completely silent as she worked on cleaning up his cybernetic, her hands pulling out another tool to properly clean the innards of the socket of any debris. While she didn’t seem too bothered by it, the occasional twitches and twinges of the captain indicated that something other than her scraping was getting to him. Somewhere amongst his curious rambling, her cleaning stopped and she lifted her head to stare at him with a fairly somber look in her silvery eyes. Her voice, though it was calm and collected, seemed a little tired rather than irritated, ”You know you don’t have to talk to me, right? You don’t have to pretend to care to save your crew from having their livers stolen in the dead of night. They’re safe. What the Dominion did to me is ‘my own ******** problem’ and ‘I’m not that ******** important’,” she quoted his shouting from the previous week, this time without the spiteful tone she usually added to her words. This time around, they came off a bit bland and emotionless, like it was easier to feel absolutely nothing at all. Her eyes flickered back down to his arm, the tools picking back up and digging into the grooves of the metal implant. ”Róisín Serafina Verbena was the name I was born with. I don’t usually go by it anymore but it seems to be the most common one used onboard for now. I’ll be out of your hair soon enough and that name will die out in fizzle. Please, if this is just casual conversation to pass the time, don’t ask what they did to that stupid little child who thought she was helping the people she loved…”

”I’m sure you understand the lack of both historical evidence, and practicality, for a hook...besides, that was just for a missing hand. Not the entire ******** appendage.” Roisin’s little quip had amused Alister slightly, more so than anything else she had ever said. He typically found the exercise of speaking to Roisin more arduous than anything else imaginable. It gave him for comfort and satisfaction to drag his face through a field of broken glass than to have one of these contentious little conversations with the ever furious maiden. He noticed subtle changes in her expression, and while he couldn’t read what sort of difference it had in her mood, it was enough to know that she wasn’t entirely on her game. ”I’m very aware that I don’t have to speak with you, love. And to tell you the truth, it’s been a whole lot easier not having to speak to anyone, except the occasional chat with dear Persephone. I’ve preferred the silence to the doubtful faces, filled with defeat. I seem to be lucky enough that you’ve shown up, and you couldn’t give less of a damn what happened to any of us. It’s...well, therapuetic, I suppose is the word. To be able to speak to someone that doesn’t even consider my failure a noteworthy moment in their existence, even for a second. Aye, you have a lot of other judgements about me, and many of them accurate enough. I’m not speaking to you just to save anyone’s life this time. I’m not giving any reassuring words or placating bullshit. And yes, I may have been a bit harsh in our last little encounter. But you probably know that you’re not the easiest to get along with. ********’ hell, it’s what they’ve always said about first impressions.” Why he was continuing to try to appeal to this woman was beyond his own comprehension. It was even another genuine attempt, but probably a waste of time like the other. This time they were not gambling for lives. She didn’t have her frightening maw open, ready to strike if one wrong word was uttered. He had quoted his own harsh words, parroting it back to him without any of her usual spite. Was she mocking him? Trying to get a rise out of him? What were her motives? He frowned as she began to answer his question, her name so pretty as it slipped from her tongue. She seemed reluctant to share more, as if she didn’t see the point. ”I’m not just passing the time. I’m curious....some of the things you said before. It’s like you were trying to show your pain to someone, but that someone was too much of an a**. Like you’re struggling to let anyone else feel your sorrow. I’ve seen a lot of sorrow aboard this ship...Daniella and her time at GenEx, being a little lab rat to those monsters, who have her all over again. Christian, his own father allowing horrifying experiments to innocent people, expecting him to continue with their legacy. Alexei and Rhia both ravaged by a drug addiction that was thrust upon them as they struggled to survive in this world. Nova surrendered her loyalties for the safety of her lover, who is now dead because of my own ineptitude. Octavian, who came to me as a prisoner for trying to arrest me, has started a rebellion against those who have always been his family and friends because he finally saw the horrid truth. But you are still a puzzle to me. You refuse to believe that I’m sorry for lying to you, and I understand your trepidation. I’m not the most trustworthy man there has ever been. But I told you about myself. I shared with you how the Dominion destroyed or took all which I held dear, in one shape or another. Those are things that not many on this ship know. And it felt like a bit of my soul put itself back together. Perhaps it will be easier for you...if you talk about it. I am willing to listen to you. And it wouldn’t be the first time I made someone else’s problem my own problem. What did the Dominion do to you, Roisin? Who’s the scared little girl behind the frightening mask?”

Róisín was quiet for a bit, debating if she really should tell the captain her story. It had seemed to come back to bite her in the butt each time she spilled a bit of her tale. He had already used it once to manipulate her, and a second time to hit her where it hurt; what would this third attempt bring about? As she stared down at the man’s shoulder, she contemplated the pros and cons. Then she wondered if he really deserved another chance. What good would it do now to speak to him? What purpose did it serve? She knew she wouldn’t feel better from the talk. The last person who had discovered her experience with the Dominion had started to stick to her like glue. The little blonde knew what it was like to be the Dominion’s toy. She knew what it was like to be surgically altered for their amusement. This man in her hands had just lost his arm and self-confidence to the Dominion. He had woken up terrified with a robotic attachment to his body; something he had never asked for, especially after their horrible defeat and failure at the hands of the Dominion. She was sure he wasn’t the only one feeling terrible on board the ship. His injury was by far worse than any of the ones the crew had sustained in the attack, yet something told the woman that his missing limb wasn’t the complete cause of his moping. She let out a breath of air, resigning to his curiosity. ”Alright… but if I find out that this is another ploy, I promise you, you will have something to worry about. And this time, it really IS a threat.” The sternness in her voice had temporarily returned, though there was a bone chilling coldness to the bitter tone she had chosen to take. She was still as dangerous as the night she had invaded the ship, and she needed the captain to keep that in mind, if not for her own desires to keep up a façade of a bloodthirsty monster. ”When I was about six years old my parents enrolled me in the Dominion run Hightower Interplanetary Academy for Gifted Individuals. It’s an elitist private institution, so if you can’t keep up you get thrown out. If you manage to impress the higher ups of the Dominion’s ranks then you get hand-picked to work for them. I worked hard, got noticed, and started working in Cyberteknik Industries’ labs at a fairly young age. It was everything I could have ever dreamt for… They had me do little odds and ends, work my way up till I was in charge of my own lab and had several publications for my work. I wanted to help people. I wanted to make robots, AIs, cybernetics; anything that would make their lives easier. My designs focused on smaller pieces for better movement and sensitivity and nanotechnology that could solve so many problems without the need to be hacked to pieces. I didn’t like the fact that there were so many factions of the Dominion that cared more about the money they could squeeze from their consumers than the people they were supposed to be serving. It got to a point where I began to recycle metal, reverse engineer the designs of other factions to better our products, and focus more on fixing older models rather than convincing people to go out and buy the latest and greatest thing. I… didn’t think very much of it when I got orders to design a couple of new weapons. I wasn’t a fan of the idea but they promised to fund a project pertaining to nanobots used to combat organ rejection and repair parts of the body that can’t be operated on. How could I refuse? I was a pacifist but… I thought ‘what could it really hurt to design a weapon or two if it means I get to save millions of lives?’ I built them their little smart guns, bombs, and lasers, and sent them in with the rest of my reports. When I got invited to meet with the Board of Directors, I never thought I’d be signing my life away in blood. I was naive. The last thing I remembered doing was drinking to our toast and the intense burning… I remember screaming for help, choking on my own bloody vomit as their corrosive poison ate away at my insides, forming blisters onto blisters all along my insides… I remember falling to the ground, and the rest of them just SITTING there. I remember feeling my tongue drop out of my mouth and my intestines scatter across the ground as it ate a hole through my stomach before the scorching in my chest made the world go dark… The next thing I knew I was falling into a pile of garbage, had no idea where I was or what I was wearing, and… there was something sticking out of my head…” The woman reached up and touched the side of her head, briefly feeling a slight scar hidden beneath her hair, ”I panicked and ripped it out. I could feel something warm and moist dripping, but it was too dark to see anything… Then I heard someone ask if I was alright. It was a little short circuiting AI that you now know as Karl. It turns out we had both gotten thrown into a Plutonian Junkyard, and ended up doomed for compression. He had just enough light for me to use to find my way out of the trash and back onboard the ship. I couldn’t remember a large span of time between toasting wine glasses with the higher ups and ending up in a trash pile. I thought maybe there had been an accident. When I found my way to the bathroom to clean up I got scared by another woman, except… it wasn’t a woman, …it was a reflection…MY reflection. They had completely reconstructed my face; stuck needles in my eyes and sucked out the fluid in my irises to give them that lovely glass appearance, tattooed this bright matte red to cover up all the blood vessels that had burst when I was crying for someone to stop the fire burning me from the inside out, altered my brown hair into this iridescent lavender, sewed up my abdominal muscles into an internal corset and removed my floating ribs to be more appealing to the eye, and worst of all tattooed my eyes and cheeks with ’dehumanizing marks’ so that every officer who looks at me knows I’m less than fifty percent organic and in an emergency situation my life means absolutely NOTHING. I had black sludge oozing out of the side of my head and if that wasn’t freaky enough someone branded and tattooed a barcode into the back of my neck that’s programmed into the nanobots’ systems. No matter how many times I tried to slice it off it kept growing back…” There was a shakiness to her voice that was somewhere between absolute anguish and resentment. ”Then I started to remember what had happened… I remembered the burning, I remembered their indifference and betrayal, I remembered being sliced open on a slab and watching them scoop out handfuls of dissolved organs from my body cavity, and I remembered where I had been all that time inbetween… They tried to pass me off as a ‘Biological Hazard Containment Unit’, and shipped me out with a crank on the side of my head to keep me an empty smiling doll, ready to dispose of diseased organs and cadavers found on wreckage. That crew… THAT unmonitored crew did anything they wanted to because there was no one to tell them otherwise way out on Pluto. And what happens when humans are left to their own devices for long periods of time? They get bored. They get bored and start shoving things into places they don’t belong. What they did to my body…” Her voice cracked, as though she had wanted to burst into tears, though her eyes were too downcast and refusing to even look at Alister’s face at this point to determine if she indeed was going to cry. ”I get to be repeatedly reminded of amongst all the other night terrors that plague me… bent over tables and desks, shoved into small spaces, completely and utterly violated because ’what do we care? She’s not really alive. If we break her we can have her replaced with a newer model.’. And that’s exactly what they did. They hacked into the device sticking out of my head and programmed me to throw myself down the garbage chute as an excuse to order a new top of the line android… And who would walk into the bathroom but one of the very people flickering across my vision… The next thing I knew he was dead. My hands were covered in his blood and I was eating him, bringing handfuls of blood to my lips like I hadn’t eaten in months. It was disgusting. My brain was screaming to stop but my body refused to listen. I had absolutely no control over what it was doing and as loudly as my brain screamed that what I was doing was wrong, there was a part of me that loved it… When I was finally able to control myself… I cried. I cried for hours because I couldn’t deal with the fact that I was stuck in a body that I have no control over and was slowly losing my humanity… I needed to escape, I wanted to go back to Cyberteknik and find out what had really happened. I figured it was just a horrible accident, a contaminated bottle of wine, a terrorist attack, something other than my idols completely wiping me off the face of the planet… I kept having blackouts, crew kept disappearing, and any time I tried to eat or drink actual food I got sick…there was absolutely nothing I could do and then Karl completely burnt out. I had to get him repaired and find a way back home so I sent out an emergency beacon, which did work… for the most part. I was able to fix Karl and rebuild him and people did come to my rescue several times… but they weren’t any better than the plutonians… Each one wanted certain favors in exchange for their help, and ‘no’ wasn’t an answer to pirates, Dominion, or Olympians. They were all the same… In most cases I had to kill them if I wanted to live long enough to escape, in other cases the blackouts took care of it… I decided to turn the signal off and let this body rot away. If nobody came by I’d eventually starve and I wouldn’t have to hurt anyone anymore… That’s what I had assumed anyhow… Another black out and I awoke months later in an apartment complex on a different planet and every single person in the suite was dead… I had no idea who these people were or if they had helped me, I didn’t even know how I had gotten there. But I knew I didn’t like innocent people slaughtered because I couldn’t control myself… I had a choice to make. Get used to the fact that my life would be plagued with long periods of painful starvation and eventual blackout sessions where I can just learn to ignore it ever happening, or find a reason to kill… It helped when I finally did figure out what Cyberteknik had done. They claimed I had died in an ‘accident’, sent my family some money, and took it upon themselves to ‘continue’ my research that I had so ‘generously’ signed away my rights to in the event of my ‘untimely’ death. They used my prototypes and designs to create weapons that respond to specific DNA signatures and tossed anything else in the trash with no intention of ever looking back. They assumed if I ever woke up I’d come running back grateful that my life had not only been saved but my body had been remodeled as a complementary service . Instead the opposite was true, I got angry. I decided to give them hell and show them they’re absolutely nothing without the people they’re constantly ******** over. Several years later, here I am, still hopping from place to place in search of my next meal and thinking of ways to make the humanity that created this monster run around in panicked circles. I’ve accepted that this is the way things will always be for me. I can’t stop looking for reasons people should die, because I have to eat one way or another and I’d much rather know who it is… I’ve tried harvesting organs and bones from crews, though that takes time and the people who survive started spreading tales of the ‘boogie man’ which makes it harder to sneak onto ships and take them down one person at a time. When I tell you I don’t have a choice, it’s because I don’t. When I tell you I’m dead, it’s because I don’t have the option of living. There’s no free will for me, because no matter what lifestyle I choose I’m still a slave to the nanobots keeping me alive, which will always tie me to Cyberteknik’s greedy little fingers…It’s only a matter of time before there’s only the Skeleton Harvester inside this vessel… and there’s nothing anyone can do about it…” Her hands had started to shake, the cleaning tool tinkering against the metal like a tiny jackhammer and the woman knew she had done all that she could at the moment. Her eyes still wouldn’t face Alister. She didn’t want to see his face. She didn’t want to hear the insults or yelling that seemed to always come after she revealed something to him. Something about voicing her story, to someone she assumed didn’t give two shits about her, was worse than reliving them through visions and dreams. Perhaps it was even the notion that she had shown him a weakness in her façade. It was so much easier when she was a mindless creature ruled by simple hunger to them. Revealing the last bit of humanity, the last bit of sorrow and pain that plagued her, was a hopeless endeavor. As her mind wondered just why she had even humored the captain at all, her hands dropped the tool and used alcohol pad into the bag. She immediately spun on her toes and speed walked out of the captain’s chambers, heading straight for her ship to hide away until she was able to compose herself.

The Skeleton Harvester was reported to have left the ship for several days, her ship still within the cargo bay and the bodies still frozen within the cold storage. It was enough to indicate that she would return eventually, though nobody knew for sure. No one even seemed to know where she had gone or when she had left. A couple of crew members mentioned hearing something dragging, scraping, along the corridors at night, only to find nothing when they took a look around. Others mentioned hearing echoes of metallic clanging, like something was being dropped somewhere on the ship, and attributed it to the maintenance work being done on the ship. Still, there were plenty that were convinced that they would never return from a late night trip to the bathroom, especially with a monster lurking around. When music began to softly pour from the cargo bay, it could only have meant that the beast had returned. The snowy haired dame, dressed in ripped leggings, high rise shorts, boots, a wide necked crop top, and a pair of mirror coated shades, was bent over one of the destroyed bots recovered from their failed rescue attempt. Parts were being thrown out of the robot’s innards, scattering along the floor as she moved them out of her way, as her hands worked on removing the power cell. The occasional spark of circuits shorting within the machine would have been off putting to most; however, the woman seemed not the least bit afraid of a possible electroshock. In fact, she seemed perfectly content as she sung along with each soothingly somber note, ”OooooOooOoh you like to think that you’re immune to the stuff, oh yeah.. It's closer to the truth to say you can't get enough. You know you're gonna have to face it, you're addicted to love.”

Days after his little enlightening, Alister had set out from his cabin for the first time. Now Alister understood. The aspects of her personality, the way she treated him and the others. Her desire to feast upon flesh. It all made absolute sense. It was a normal reaction to the horrors that she so vividly and painfully described. Alister had finally gained a grasp on The Skeleton Harvester, and it was the only thing that he could focus on since. It made him angry, deep inside, just as he had been when he learned about Daniella, and what GenEx had done to her. Another one of the Dominion’s little experiments had found its way under his roof. But what could he even do about it? He couldn’t help her, that was for sure. Not that she would even accept it if he could. He had tried to protect Daniella, to allow her a better life, and he had basically delivered her back to her masters with a ******** bow. He was blundering through the halls, not really sure of his path, when he thought he heard...music. It came from the cargo bay, and noticing the way the others had started avoiding it, he suspected that Roisin had something to do with it. Upon entering the bay, his eyes were instantly drawn to probably the most obvious thing within; the damsel in a pair of shorts, her rear seeming to bounce and sway to the tune of the music. He watched for probably far too long, perhaps because of his lack of recent intimacy. She seemed to be tearing apart the innards of some old machine, and as Alister approached, one of the components sailed through the air, smacking him firmly on the head, snapping him from his trance. He cleared his throat loudly, as if to get Roisin’s attention, not sure if she would turn around and tear away his face just for standing there. ”What’s with all this damn junk in my cargo bay?” His tone was calm and even, completely reasonable. He seemed curious as to what she was doing with a bunch of old scraps.

The loud thunk of a part she had thrown out hitting someone in the face caused the woman’s head to slowly lift from the mech’s innards, her eyes hidden behind the reflective surface of her sunglasses. Steadying herself on the rim of the robot’s body, she was able to crane her neck enough to see the captain standing there. She was surprised that he had asked her a question without shouting, even more so that he had actually left his room. She seemed to stare at him for short while, eventually diving shoulder deep into the droid once again, her eyes refusing to make direct contact with his. ”I wanted to see if there was anything of value inside one of the bots they sent on board. The more I open this damn thing up the less impressed I am with it. There’s too many damn wires and not enough space properly utilized. It’s insulting to think THIS is what they send alongside GenEx’s little pawns. It’s no wonder no one takes Cyberteknik seriously when they’re pumping out pathetic little designs like this. They’re losing their touch.” Though it was obvious she was annoyed and back to her old self, it was also obvious that she was simply trying to distract herself with anything she could think to get her hands on. Her hands clicked on something, constantly repositioning as she tugged on a part that seemed reluctant to release from its connections. She frowned, straddling the bot for extra support as she tugged a couple more times and eventually ripped out a blackened, burnt, bit of metal and glass the size of a pineapple. ”I haven’t seen this model in years, it’s no wonder Karl was able to eat it so easily.”She tossed it to the side, sliding off the bot’s slick body and dusting off her hands.

”I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that we weren’t even worth top of the line mechs trying to kill us while looking for Daniella.” He attemped to cross his arms as he watched her work, before he looked down at his stub sadly. The nature of her task so glaringly obvious, especially when she refused to look him right in the eyes. He was debating whether or not he should bring up whatever opinions he had formulated after their last ‘session’. Instead, he decided to press the conversation along the already open line of discussion. ”These do seem pretty shite compared to the ones we saw on the ground...but even those only took one or two good shots from Lissy’s rifle. And Octavian hacked them as if it were child’s play. Though, Cyberteknik is the leading authority on the subject, in the eyes of the people. Must have the best marketing team this side of the Milky Way. Mass produced garbage, sold for exorbitant prices to every greedy little pig that begs for the chance to pay them. Definitely the Dominion way…all about profit, nevermind the misery.” He was gently inching towards the subject, quite sure that pressing too hard would cause a violent reaction from the cyborg. His eyes scanned her features, not sure if he was viewing them differently than before, but at the same time noticing how well they conformed to the consumer’s thoughts on perfection. ”Anything in particular you’ll gathering the parts for? If Cyberteknik muchs such absolute garbage, I hardly see the point of taking their bots apart, unless you really think that you can put all these wires and chunks of metal to a much better use. Seems better to just leave them to gather rust.”

The woman looked back at the robot, one of her hands running along the smooth finish as she thought about the event. ”Something doesn’t quite fit this picture… I can build better machines in my sleep and it’s not that hard to bullet proof something made entirely of metal. This was a big event for the Dominion, and if their intention was to capture someone aboard a pirate ship, or take down a high risk adversary, you’d think they’d want to proudly display their merchandise. I know they like to keep the best for themselves, but this is ridiculous. I’m guessing this was a GenEx run event and Cyberteknik is still being a little brat about their childish little rivalry. But would they really risk ruining something this big for something so petty…?” Her fingers drummed on the metal hull, thoughts still racing through her head. The more she looked into it, the less sense it made, and the less she liked the feeling it left in her gut. Something was going on behind the scenes in the Dominion, something big and political. Trying to defend Cyberteknik Industries and say they were against the hanging of the pirate king out of some moral code was out of the question. They hated pirates just as much as the rest of the Dominion. ”Well you’re half right about that. Cyberteknik makes quality goods for their customers, but it’s a matter of good verus great. It’s not unheard of for them to use the failures of another faction to market their own products. They prey upon the desperation of their consumers and promise everything their poor little hearts desire. They use it to get free advertising, not just any advertising either, they get the people’s attention because of those little ‘happy endings’ so many claim to find after all the other factions ‘fail’. People eat that up. It blinds them to the fact they’re probably going to be in debt for life for one of their products. And the ones who go to Cyberteknik first are constantly dragged deeper into it because of all the ‘customization’ and ‘newer’ ‘shinier’ models design teams are pushing out.” She walked over to an open chest beside her ship, digging around inside the contents until she found a golf ball sized cube. She tossed it up and down in her palm as she cantered back to her ‘work station’, sticking her arms back into the empty shell of a robot. ”I can reuse most of it. I’ll probably sort through all the things I tossed later after I finish fixing it up and see what’s salvageable. Scraps can probably use it to print out some parts for me to reconstruct this thing with. I can probably get it up and running again, see if I can’t sneak it into a Unity transportation unit and cause a massive recall.”

"Good to know that even the power hungry, money grubbing corporate gods of the Dominion succumb to the lowest, most primal urges of the businessman. All about the profit. Be better than the competition. The customer is only right as long as they continue to pay. Still, I find it odd that they'd let a stupid feud get in the way of something as important as a human telepath. That alone blows away any simple innovation in any field of study. The applications of that are...well...limitless. You'd think Cyberteknik would consider playing nice if only for a chance to grasp at the rewards for themselves...could have captured Daniella themselves, and ransomed her to GenEx. Could have tried to study her, maybe find a technical solution to the genetic problem, as they seem so prone to do. For such a powerful group, the Dominion is still fractured. And with the implications of Octavian's little rebellion, I wonder how much worse it's going to get. Still, the Dominion on their worst day are still magnitudes greater than us on our best. It was stupid for us to challenge them. They didn't send their best toys because they knew they didn't need to. Still, the ship, and everyone on it, would have died to this meek display of tech if it weren't for you and Karl. A silver lining in the clouds of a shitstorm." Alister watched as Roisin continued her work, looking around at the cargo bay, taking notice of several long overdue repairs. "Causing a little havoc in the Dominion ranks with their own crap definitely is a good angle. Good use for this junk. I wonder if this damned mechanic could build anything out of it. Maybe he could build me a ******** arm. It'd be nice to have the ability to drink some whiskey and eat something at the same time again." And now he had reached the stage where he tried to make a joke about his newly acquired deformity. Still, the mechanic that was repairing the ship, whom Alister had yet to meet, was doing a great job. Persephone spoke a load of praise for his work, as the repairs were quite personal for her, as the ship was basically her own body. After a long moment of silence, Alister frowned, taking the time to stare at Roisin a little longer. "So, I doubt you'll appreciate me bringing this up...but all those things that Cyberteknik did to you...wouldn't it be easier to take vengeance on them? Force them to find a way to...correct it? Or at least give you a different way to live with it? Or something? Surely there's some bright mind there who still has some sort of moral compass...or better yet, try and blackmail them with the true horrors of the corporation. Sure, it wouldn't do much to dent the Dominion overall, but I think it would have at least a minimal butterfly effect. Just like Octavian showing everyone Halloran's true colors. Someone, somewhere, will be upset by the truth, enough to do something about it."

”Well taking into consideration the fact that Daniella can’t always read my mind because she says there’s ‘static in my brain’, I’d say that not only Cyberteknik but also Maelstrom and T.I.T.A.N. wouldn’t have much use in mass producing telepaths. I’m not even sure they’d have the resources considering that’s GenEx’s territory. They probably weren’t even told about GenEx’s crown jewel because someone would do a little digging and find out that this girl was easily able to bypass GenEx brand helmets and gain all the information she needed to escape. I don’t doubt they could make something to combat a possible mental invasion, but that takes money. Now that I think about it… Perhaps they planned for the mechs and robots to do so poorly. Soldiers would need cybernetics after their injuries, new armor, and if you had succeeded GenEx would have been taken down a peg and lost two BIG assets. If another faction of the Dominion starts stealing from its siblings, all-out war breaks out and the bad blood thickens. If a pirate steals from a faction, the Dominion can rally all its forces against a ‘common’ enemy. That certainly makes things a lot more interesting, doesn’t it? ” Róisín didn’t really respond to his praise; the way he had thrown her kindness back in her face still fresh in her mind. No one had asked her to rebuild their medical bot or look after what remained of the crew, she had done it because she knew they needed it. Even when Alister commented on his arm, the woman didn’t do much more than pause for a second. It wasn’t until she heard him bring up the contents of their last conversation that she stopped what she was doing, staring into the droid’s cavernous body. That’s when the sarcastic tone came back to her voice. ”Vengeance? What do you call what I’m doing now? I think sneaking into their cabins while they sleep and implanting pace makers to make their hearts race at over two-hundred beats per minute is at the very least spiteful. Even if I wanted to go down that route they’ve got me blocked at every corner because what they did to me was legal. I signed a contract giving them rights to all of my projects to do as they please, but there are also some parts which allow me to stop a project if I don’t see it going the way I envisioned it. If I’m dead, however, that’s not something they’d ever have to worry about. The Board never does anything themselves, and if there’s no evidence linking them to a murder but there IS some linking a hired hand who served us do you honestly think they wouldn’t hesitate to throw them into the lion’s den? ‘Habeas Corpses’ essentially says that dead bodies don’t own anything and don’t have the same rights as a living body. I have a certificate of death, yet here I am because of their ‘great and powerful scientists working around the clock’. I don’t have several of my organs and most of the ones I do have are cybernetics which are designed to house nano bots. Cybernetics are a one way thing, once you have one there’s no going back to organics because your body adjusts to a synthetic part. In my case, my blood was replaced with nano bots suspended in a fluid, which would destroy an actual set of heart and lungs. They rebuild my cells, transport important things like oxygen and adrenaline; all because I’m a shambling corpse that would quickly rot away if my nano bots failed. They can’t make things out of thin air either, so I have to provide the proteins and amino acids that they can use to keep me alive. When they start running low on supplies they’re programmed to make sure they get more, the same way your body naturally would except… this is a lot more painful. It’s like every fiber of my being is screaming to eat something and threatening to start eating itself if I don’t. If I ignore it, it gets worse. By a logical standpoint, I should be grateful that they left my eyes and hands alone so I could come back to work for them when I regain my senses. Then there’s a matter of their complementary services that covered up the fact I was half melted. Then there’s a matter of these…” The woman lifted up her glasses and turned to finally look at the captain, tapping one of the markings on her cheek. ”These are giant red flags that say ‘assume this object isn’t important and focus on something else’. The last thing the Dominion wants to do is lose valuable workers. If that means leaving someone behind because they’re not ‘perfect’ so be it as long as time isn’t wasted rescuing something like an android when there are actual living being humans needing to be saved. All they have to do is say someone screwed up in my programming and no one would ever be the wiser. No if I want to take down Cyberteknik, I have to let them dig their own grave then then shove them down into it. I have no chance of winning on their turf, but that’s something I have to deal with.”

”I think it’s less the Dominion than it is Halloran. b*****d has had it out for me for years. It was just convenient that Daniella fell into my lap when she did. Easier for the little pet to go to his Dominion masters, asking for money and toys to play with. Now that Daniella is back in their clutches, I doubt he’ll find it easy to obtain the same level of funding and support...especially since he’s just an obedient little lapdog. They’ll replace him eventually, with someone else less single-minded. At least, after things settle down. Octavian’s rebellion will be quelled, probably with all of Unity being crushed under the corporate machine. They’ll be replaced with another company, who will be given their assets and a scary speech, using Unity as an example. With the Pirate King dead, and the rebel pirates either killed at New Armstrong or rotting somewhere else, they’ll have no more need of Kenneth Halloran. The Alliance, or even the independant pirates...none of them are stupid enough to try and take on the Dominion. I was the only one who had the requisite lack of brain cells for something that bold. There was no common enemy. There was a fly that needed swatting. And they did much more than that.” Alister maneuvered himself over to a small crate, taking a seat and watching Roisin as their conversation continued. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see a few members of the crew peak into the bay, wondering why on Earth their captain was chatting it up with her of all people. ”Legality of their actions does not mean anything beyond the halls of the Dominion. Legal and ethical are not the same. For example, Octavian managed to turn some of the Dominion soldiers in New Armstrong against Halloran. Halloran’s allegiance with the Lethe crime syndicate, GenEx’s horrifying experiments...I’m sure there’s a stack of contracts that make that whole sordid ordeal perfectly legal. But the morality and ethical implications of the situation as a call to arms to the more reasonable among them. Who’s to say that the same wouldn’t happen if you uncovered the methods and madness of how Cyberteknik treated one of its loyal employees, just to take control of their research for a pretty penny. And even if there is no concrete proof, linking their hands to it...all you need is to create that doubt. Fighting a one woman war against Cyberteknik one step at a time? It doesn’t seem like the smartest approach. If you think they’re going to dig their own grave anytime soon...well, I suppose it’s a good thing that you can wait awhile. The longer you wait, the stronger the Dominion gets. Even with petty squabbles, company rivalries, and ruthless business ethic. The only thing stopping them from conquering the entire system is the Children of Olympus. Once that obstacle is surmounted, they will be able to push out into the furthest stars. You either need to start putting some shovels in their hands, or get someone to help you dig. Not that there’d be any point. They’d just end up killing anyone dumb enough to help you. I’m obviously just speculating.” He sighed, bouncing his boots against his seat, ”And if you really want to be there to push them in their grave...what’s to say they won’t grab ahold and take you with them?” His tone was soft, and so obviously that of a defeated man. Each time it seemed he would spark off into his typical anti-Dominion, murderous rampage persona, he returned to a sad, sorry, broken man that was circling the drain. He still believed in the fight, but now saw only futility, and there wasn't any of the fight left within his own heart.



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[Yasha_Glory]

I'm miss autonomy, miss nowhere, I'm at the bottom of me
Miss androgyny, miss don't care, What I've done to me
¤Company: Alister & Persephone ¤Condition: 50-100% ¤Location: The Persephone…?
I am misused, I don't wanna do, Be not your slave
Misguided, I mind it, I'm missin' the train

Something about the whole ordeal seemed to ignite the Skeleton Harvester’s usual passionate fire. Her brow furrowed as she set her glasses atop her head and kept her radiantly white hair out of her face. She looked to the captain with a deadlights stare, something smoldering in her iron gaze, and spoke in a weighty tone. ”A grave is where I belong. We all have to die sometime, and to fool yourself into believing otherwise is only going to make you hesitate. If you never jump the gun, how do you know you wouldn’t have survived victoriously? No matter what I do I’m either doomed to be a slave to the machine or a dying scream. Does that mean I’m going to sit somewhere and cry about it? [********] no! I WANT them to be down in the ground with me. I want to find some type of solace in the fact that IF I lose at least I went down fighting and got to be a thorn in their side. I have all the time in the world to pull their teeth because they made the mistake of ******** with the wrong person! There’s always going to be someone pulling the strings and trying to rule over everything; the Dominion, Olympians, or whatever rises up from their ashes. Neither option is preferable, but in the end we’re all cursed to keep falling into this cycle because we CAN’T live without them and they can’t live without us. Call me an anarchist if you want but letting them destroy themselves is the only way something better is going to come out of all this. I’m just speeding up the process because I have nothing else going on in this miserable existence of mine. But YOU--“ she growled as she slammed her fists against the robot’s body and faced him with anger welling up in her chest. ”I believed you when you said you’d take them down! I didn’t trust you, but I believed there was some truth to your words every time you spouted out all that crap about doing what you’re doing for your crew and the rest of humanity! I don’t like being wrong, Alister. There’s nothing that pisses me off more than a miscalculation, and lately I’ve been off my game. Things don’t always go the way we want, so sometimes you have to blow s**t up instead of accepting defeat. History is written by the winners of the fight, the ones who survive the longest, not the ones who have everything go perfectly; it’s the people who can erase any traces of their failures and keep going!” The woman marched straight up to the Captain and grabbed ahold of the dog tags draped around his neck, pulling them as high up into his face as she could get them. ”Now you listen and you listen good! I’ve had just about enough of your little piss pot attitude. You keep bringing up these damn things every single time you see fit to try and chew me out, but you don’t even know what they ******** are! These aren’t people who died because of you, they’re people who died FOR you! They followed you because they believed you too! They followed you because they WANTED to! They knew the risks but decided to put their lives on the line so people like you could LIVE! Sitting around feeling shitty is spitting on their graves because that’s no way to live! It’s all fine and ******** dandy if you want to carry them around, but don’t forget WHY they’re being carried! You have an entire ship full of people still waiting around for their captain to lead them, do you think they care if it’s towards glory or death? They would have left a long time ago if that was the case so you at least owe it to them to get off your a** and face them! They need you! You’re still alive and kicking and that’s enough to give the universe the hell it deserves! If building you a stupid arm so you can stop being a little b***h is what it takes to make an honest man out of you then I’ll build you the best damn cybernetic you’ve EVER ******** seen! I don’t care if you hate my guts or think I’m some type of self-obsessed psycho, but I’m not going to let anyone stand in my way! If they want to make toys, I’m going to show them what it means to play with the big boys. You asked me to join your fight so you can give the Dominion a couple of nightmares, so you can either help me plague their sweet little dreams of conquest or sit here and rot! If I have to force your hand to get something I want out of it then so be it!”

Alister stared back at Roisin as she shouted in his face. He didn’t even flinch as she took hold of his dog tags, and let her little speech ring through the air. With every single word, all of the conflicting feelings in Alister’s mind and heart ceased their warring, only to listen to the cyborg. The passion of her argument struck him like waves of fire, and as if it were a natural reaction, his fist clenched. The muscles in his jaw began to tighten. Slowly, but surely, the sad, defeated look seemed to fall away from his face. It was replaced by something far more familiar to the crew of the Persephone. That look on the captain’s face...was one of fury. And not just any fury, either. It was the look he had when someone mentioned Halloran’s name. It was the angry and hatred that coursed through his entire being at the very thought of the Dominion getting exactly what they wanted. No one else aboard the ship had the balls to say what Roisin had just said to his face. Everyone else was too busy, wallowing in their own miseries, because if their captain couldn’t defeat his own demons of this failure, what hope did any of them have? All of them had felt the sting of defeat, and as any other time when things had not gone according to plan, they had looked to Alister for guidance. That was his true failure. He sat around and he brooded, and he mewled, and he was just another broken toy in the toy box. Raised voices had attracted the attention of quite a few members of the crew, and they had formed an audience outside the cargo bay. The gradual change in Alister’s posture and expression as Roisin went on could have been compared to a phoenix, bursting into flames, only to rise from the ashes. And Roisin was lighting that fire. He reached up, grabbing Roisin’s hand and prying it away from the dog tags, letting them fall back down, bouncing off his chest with a clink. And then he smiled. ”I can almost feel how much you hate them, you know. I finally think I’m beginning to understand just a fraction of what kind of person you are, Roisin. And you know what...you’re not wrong. I can’t let that one pass. I promised to save Tiberius, and he’s dead. I made a promise to protect the members of my crew, and now we’re battered and broken. I promised to protect Daniella, and to take her somewhere safe. So many promises I’ve broken...but not one more. The promise I made to you...about taking the Dominion apart...I make that promise to you again. We will hunt them down, and tear them down, piece by piece, until it’s them that fears us, and not the other way around. They’ve taken too many lives in their hands, and crushed them without a care. I’ll do it for you, for myself, for Tiberius, for Daniella...and for everyone else that has suffered at their hands. I only have one little request...I want to tear out Kenneth Halloran’s ******** heart...with the best cybernetic you can make. I wanna hold it up for the entire Dominion to see. I want their leaders to look upon it, and tremble in fear, because they know that they’ll be next. And then I want to crush it in that hand, and know that I’ve destroyed everything that monster stood for.” In the background, a single pair of hands began to clap, before the crowd of assembled crew broke into roaring applause at the sight of the feared Skeleton Harvester ‘fixing’ their Captain.

Somewhere amongst all the tough love, the captain had regained the light in his eyes. The hollowness that had come from the depression shrouding his vision in darkness dissipated. The dull finish of his baby blues frosted over into the raging blizzard that she remembered him having before, though the determination in his face had intensified. Far too focused on her irritation, she hadn’t even noticed his hand rising up to touch her arm until she felt its warmth brushing over her wrist. She expected him to throw her hand away, but was instead surprised to find that his fingers gently wormed their way into her grasp and replaced the set of metal tags. The rage in her face relaxed, looking at his hand for a bit as she listened to him speak. Her eyes flickered back to him at the mention of his promise to her, feeling his grip tighten as his desire to destroy the Dominion came back with a vengeance. Her lips softly curled into the smallest of grins, barely visible and only lasting a split second before she spoke, ”You say that like it’s hard.” Her free hand reached up and flipped some hair, which had come forward during her little rant, over her shoulder, perfectly content with her abilities. Her head whipped around when she heard applause beginning to fill the cargo hold, that ever present seriousness returning to her expression as her teeth grinded against one another in a sinister baring. A deep reverberating growl crept from her throat, as the ‘tender’ side of the woman disappeared completely. ”THE ******** ARE YOU ALL DOING HERE?! GET OUT BEFORE I RIP YOUR LUNGS OUT THROUGH YOUR ASSES!” she roared. The ones that hadn’t scrambled out at the sound of her growling now rushed out in terror at the threat they knew to be too close to the truth for comfort. There was pushing, shoving, falling, and more than likely a couple of less than manly squeals as they ran like rats from the monster lady. There was plenty of grumbling mutterings as the woman pulled herself away from the captain and stepped back inside her ship to start pulling out boxes upon boxes of parts to start her work.

As the weeks went by, the Skeleton Harvester continued to appear and disappear on a daily basis. It was rare that anyone knew where she was, except those unlucky few that turned around to find her standing in places she previously wasn’t before. Though the captain was victim to this unfortunate torment more than a couple of times, the two’s shouting matches had seemed to almost completely die out. Their bickering had become friendlier, though only the two of them knew why. Every so often she’d come around and suddenly the captain would be wearing some type of greave on his forearm that weighed down the limb he still possessed. The device she had lovingly referred to as ‘Scraps’ was revealed to be a small 3-D printer that she had modified into a walking robot resembling a pudgy four legged animal with an appetite for inorganic materials. Shoveling in bits of scrap metal she had ‘borrowed’ from the junkyard, bullets she had removed from bodies after the Slaughter of New Armstrong, and even one or two of the droids were taken apart and shoved into the sharp blades and red hot insides of the adorable machine. Piece by piece, Róisín painstakingly designed each part and had it printed, assembling the cybernetic from the inside out while Alister’s wounds healed and he got used to the weight a replacement arm would eventually be. She had gotten measurements from Sara, double-triple checked them for herself, and used his remaining right arm as a guide for the appearance of her newest creation. Though people were curious as to how the arm would turn out, most were too frightened to bother her about it or attempt to peek over her shoulder as she worked. She cut no corners in the cybernetic’s building, making sure to add extra little details like surge suppressors to keep the arm protected from the EMP grenades the captain always seemed to have on hand. Scratch resistant and bullet proof coating, bluing to keep the arm from rusting, and blackening to keep both corrosion down and reduce the appearance of the reflective service, were repeatedly given to every nut, bolt, and metallic sheet that went into the project. The cyborg was able to utilize all the extra space that would have needed to be filled with wires and empty cavities much more efficiently due to her expertise in nano technology. There were electrical grids all through the limb, capable of collecting kinetic energy and storing it within a power cell that could be used to send out electrical shocks to short circuits and stun enemies. A crescent blade was able to extend from the side of the forearm, and a communicator was taken apart and added into the shoulder unit to remove the need of an easily lost handheld one. While there were storage compartments in the bicep for additional ammunition, the forearms were capable of expanding into chambers containing a twelve shelled magazine with a barrel placed at the top of the wrist and stabilizing shocks preventing shell shock from disengaging the entire arm. Even the greave was replaced with a counterpart to the weaponized arm, also able to shoot twelve rounds of shot gun shells with stabilizers and brass knuckles of the same metal to both protect his hand from constantly being broken by its twin and knock a couple of teeth out. When everything was collapsed, the pair of weapons appeared like ordinary cybernetics and were even programmed to scan off as ‘non-combative’ models. The two were polished, tested, and had a few finishing touches added to them; including the traditional naming of a completed model. The pair of weaponized cybernetics were known as ‘The Heartbreakers’. A tattoo of a skeleton torso ripping a large heart out of its ribcage was silk screened onto the outside of the upper arm, and though there was a bit of a debate that stirred when the pair of completed projects were presented to the captain, the silkscreen remained as a reminder of his promise to the Skeleton Harvester. Once the cyborg was able to install the limb and replace the old armlet with the slightly heavier model, both arms pulled the same amount of force on the captain’s back muscles. It took some getting used to, and even longer for the two to stop bickering long enough to let lessons begin. Calibrations were done during the first few sessions to make the movement as natural as his old organic limb, and blanks were inserted to allow the captain to learn his latest weapon without an accidental misfire into some unlucky crew member’s head. Cyberteknik’s remaining droids were upgraded and remodeled into training exercises with rubber bullets and learning technology that would study the moves of their opponent during the session’s duration. While these were valuable assets to the training room, they weren’t capable of correcting form or telling their opponents what they did wrong. The only thing they seemed able to do other than hand the a** of crew back to themselves was generate scores and percentage of possible fatality, which the crew had turned into a game of bragging rights. As the captain learned to control his new appendage, eventually he needed the unpredictability of a living opponent, without the fear of harming one of the people he held dear. The cyborg, unwilling to do so at first, eventually accepted the job, and the two pitted claws against fists. The woman had never been trained to fight and had simply learned to dodge and use the small windows of hesitation in her opponent’s style to her advantage. The captain still had instinctual reservations about letting his limbs get injured that she was able to show him as he showed her the flaws in her positions and methods. The more training sessions the two shared, the more it appeared like they were dancing, fluidly going with the flow of each other’s swipes and kicks until someone landed a hit. Weeks passed by and eventually things started to go back to some semblance of normalcy as the crew grew stronger and more confident. The Skeleton Harvester had continued to disappear every now and again, showing up during the day to hide away from the planet’s heat that was uncomfortable to the Saturnian vixen and munch on one of the bodies still stacked up in the freezer. The last of the Skeleton Harvester’s little trips was starting to go on a little longer than usual, and many began to wonder if she had abandoned them completely this time. Her ship was gone and the only thing left behind was a destroyed computer that didn’t belong to the Persephone. Had something happened to anger the beast and send her on a bloodthirsty rampage? There were still bodies left in the freezer and the news showed no reports of gruesome attacks, just the hype surrounding something going on between GenEx and Cyberteknik Industries.

And I don't know where I've been, And I don't know what I'm into, And I don't know what I've done to me
And as I watch you disappear into the ground, My one mistake was that I never let you down
So I'll waste my time and I'll burn my mind, On miss nothing, miss everything

(( Theme song for this Post ))

[Space Candy]

xxxx"Speech."xxxxx"Thoughts."xxxxx"Others."

XXXXXXXX"Daniella...Can you hear me?"

She squinted as her mind slowly starting working again. Gears turning, memories flashing past her closed eyes...She thought of their failed mission on Luna. Of Erebos, and how he had grabbed her, and of Christian. Everything was blurry, but the more she shifted into consciousness the more the images seemed to focus. She remembered grabbing Christian's hand before they had been separated, and that meant that now...
The blonde peeked open her eyes greeted with bright false lights above her. There was a pressure on her hand, and slowly her eyes moved to find the source. McLaughlin, of course. Was she surprised? Not really. Both of his hands were clasped around her right one. His skin felt rough against her own, no doubt due to his age and work ethic. Daniella tried to keep her heart rate steady as she stared at the source of all her pain. He was the thing she feared most. Out of all the things...Instinctively, Dani tried to pull her hand away from him, only to find that she physically couldn't. There was something restraining her arms. She panicked and struggled, only to find her legs were also held down to the cold table she was on. Still trying to gather all the information around her, she was able to see some needles and tubes protruding form her left arm, and faintly she could hear the whirring and beeping of several machines.

"Shh." McLaughlin reached out and stroked her hair. "You're okay now. You're home."
Like hell she was. Daniella wiggled her hand, desperately trying to free herself from his grasp---though really it would do no good. She had nowhere to go. No escape plan, and whatever narcotics were pumping through her system were debilitating her. Her reaction time was slow, and even McLaughlin's thoughts seemed to only come through sporadically. She couldn't focus. Gregory tightened his grip on Dani's hand in order to cease her struggling. It was obvious just from his expression that he was irritated with her reaction to him, but never the less he tried to sooth her. "You got beat up pretty badly. Bruised to hell...Don't worry though. They are fading fast thanks to the medication. Also, I had a word with that b*****d's supervisors. Hopefully he receives some form of punishment for hurting my darling girl." He stared off, and Daniella did her best to focus on him. He was wearing that stupid helmet. Idiot. But she could use that to her advantage.

"Where's Christian...?"
McLaughlin frowned, hard eyes moving to inspect Dani's face. "He's home now. But under tight security as I understand. Not that it matters. You won't be seeing him again."

There was a silence, and Daniella shut her eyes doing her best to remain calm. Why did he get to dictate her life? What gave him the right? "You know that helmet doesn't do s**t, right? I can still hear every little thought..." Stupid. Why did she say that? Out of spite, probably. Being a brat was the only way for her to fight back right now. But that was stupid. Stupid, stupid, and she knew it. Too late now...Of course, she couldn't really read this thoughts clearly. At least not right now. The drugs were lessening her abilities. But she didn't have to disclose that. Or anything for that matter. Yes, she should probably just shut up.
Gregory sighed and took the helmet off. Daniella watched him as he set it on a nearby table---or stand rather. There were wheels at the bottom. She was in some sort of medical facility, she'd figured that much out. "I was wondering just how you escaped last time. Not to worry though, you won't be getting out of my sights again. Your little stint has earned you a place in solitary confinement...after we get you all healed up that is." Daniella felt her stomach twist into a knot, but she did her best not to let her fear creep onto her face. "I must admit, I'm quite impressed at how much you've grown since you left. Seemed that the real world did some good for you. Telekinesis, who would have thought...Though I admit I didn't remove it from the realm of possibilities...But you had leveled off it seemed. For a while. I guess I wasn't giving you enough stimulation." McLaughlin kept an easy tone, but a smile appeared on his face as walked back to the table. He trailed his fingers along Daniella's thigh, brushing her bare skin as he pushed the cloth that was covering her nude form up to her hips. He stopped, seeming to sense her discomfort, and did his best to give his little pet a reassuring smile. Gingerly, he lifted the cloth, folding it so that her stomach was exposed.

She didn't like it. Not one bit. Why was everyone so hell bent on violating her? Daniella didn't like the way he was touching her, but she knew from his thoughts he wasn't actually going to do anything---at least not yet. Rather, that's all she was able to gather in her delirious state. She felt his fingers run along the length of the scar on her lower abdomen. She jerked at the touch, but of course remained exactly where he had her pinned. "Where'd you get this?"

Daniella took a breath. "Calypso. I don't know who. Just some random bounty hunters."
"Looks like it got taken care of well enough. Didn't scar too badly. I'll work on it some more though, and it will be like it never happened." Gregory looked to Daniella, eyes shining expectantly. What did he want? That was a stupid question. Daniella knew.
"Thank you." She placated him.
He seemed satisfied, and put his hands behind his back but didn't bother to cover Daniella back up, leaving her exposed. "Quite lucky that didn't kill you. Or that it wasn't any lower or deeper...Wouldn't want to ruin our plans would we?"

Unfortunately, Daniella knew what he meant. Exactly. Down to the T. And it wasn't from reading his thoughts currently. She'd known for a while. He hadn't bothered to hide to from her. He had told her, and that was why she left. "Your plans. Not mine." Daniella said softly, shutting her eyes again as another surge of nausea and exhaustion worked its way through her system. She could hear McLaughlin's footsteps as he made his way over to the machines and the IV lines. He was adjusting something---the medicine. Whatever it was.

"I think that's enough for now. You need more rest, Love." There was little she could do but let the drugs work through her system, causing her to slumber yet again.

---

It had been a month since she had been put back in McLaughlin's "care". The facility she was at now was smaller than where she had grown up. Even her room was tinier, but the whole complex had twice the amount of security. And what was worse was that she was alone. Solitude that was slowly starting to eat her up. Every now and then Gregory would speak to her, through intercom only. Rarely she would have guards come to give her meals, which she detested, or to give her a change of clothes. But they weren't normal guards. More like volunteers. They knew nothing of importance, so anything Daniella heard in their minds was purely surface level observation bullshit that wouldn't aid her in anyway. McLaughlin knew this, and he was determined to keep his little prize locked away for good this time around.
She was agitated. Frustrated at her own weakness and inability. She'd tried many times to bust the door down, but she was so weak from the trauma and scarce meals that her telekinesis just didn't have that "oomph" she needed to break through the three electric sliding locks. Sure, the door was dented pretty well---but when she'd done that she'd received some punishment in the form of being pumped with whatever drug McLaughlin had concocted to make her more complacent for three days. There was little she could do except count the hours and days as they passed by.

Daniella looked down at her black body suit. Skin tight, of course, it fit her like a glove and accentuated her slender shape, much to Gregory's liking. There were ports on the inside of her arms and a few along her spine: access points so to speak. For needles and other things. Her upper right arm was sore from where they'd implanted another tracking device. She would have to go through the trouble of tearing it out again if she ever escaped...Maybe this time she would use a knife instead of her fingernails though. McLaughlin had kept good on his word though, and no one would have ever guessed that she use to have a scar on her stomach, or her upper arm, or that she'd been beaten and bruised not that long ago. Daniella was back to being a little doll. Porcelain and pure on the outside, but inside she was in turmoil. She wanted out even more than she had initially. She'd tasted freedom, and being locked here was torturous. And the solitude...Oh the solitude. It left her alone with her own thoughts most of the time, which wasn't exactly healthy since she felt she was at war with herself...She longed for her friends, for freedom, and particularly Christian. It was a funny thing. How fickle the heart was...Longing for something that she'd barely even had to begin with. She wondered often if Christian thought of her, or if he was happier now that all the chaos was over.

If she ever escaped again, she wouldn't contact him. Daniella had decided that already, even though she knew her chances of escaping a maximum security facility were slim to none. It would be better that way. Christian needed to be safe at home. And despite the way things had gone on Luna, in the end she had more or less gotten what she wanted. Alister and his crew were no longer in her company, leaving them safer than they had been when she was on board. Christian was safe at home, though probably under strict rules due to his father...But Daniella...Well. She was right back where she had started, only this time she didn't have someone on the inside helping her escape.

"Heads up..." Daniella picked up faintly on Gregory's thoughts as he entered her radius. Her eyes lifted to the door and she waited for him to draw closer. He was alone, and Daniella did her best to get anything useful from him while she could, but even if she were able to get past him she would have no clue where to run, and she'd be alone with no one else's thoughts to guide her. She listened as the locks slid open. One, two, three. Finally the door opened, and Gregory strode in carrying a plate of food---Real food. Like, honesty to goodness real food that she might have found out on the streets. Daniella wanted it, after all she was back to her near starvation diet. But he was bribing her. For something. A bribe. She wouldn't take it. But it would be hard not to.
The door slid shut behind him, and he set the tray at the foot of Daniella's cot. "Brought you some food, Darling."
"No thanks."
He shrugged. "More for me then." He didn't seemed deterred by her answer---honestly he probably had expected it. And now it was just a fun way to antagonize her. He picked up a fork and stabbed a few pieces of pasta, eating casually in front of his pet. "I think we need to have a chat. About your abilities...I think it's time for you to go back under the knife."

She froze. "Why?"
"You've grown so much. I think you've got more potential than you realize. Just a few more procedures and then you'd really be just perfect." He laughed. "Of course, you'd have to go through some rigorous training. You caused so much damage while you were out. All those people dead because I was looking for you, and on top of that you can't even control your telekinesis very well. You're like a monster or something. I need you to be more refined. We will make things for you to play with. Puzzles. And maybe if you're good I'll let you spar with some prisoners."

Daniella frowned, still sitting on her cot. She stared up at him. "I'm not the monster. I'm just a girl who never had a chance. A child that you stole from a family for your own selfish reasons. You tortured me. You stole any semblance of childhood I had. You killed my brother. I'm not a monster. You are. You're a monster, and you made me this way." Daniella spoke, her volume raising towards the end of her little spiel as she became filled with anger: an emotion she had become quite familiar with lately. "That's right, you tell him."
She watched with a stern expression as Gregory set down his fork and stepped closer to her. Without a word he raised his hand and slapped her across the face. Daniella stared at him, doe eyes wider than usual. It wasn't the pain that bothered her, it was simply the fact that he had hit her. McLaughlin was the one who caused all of her torment, but even so he had never actually struck her. Quite the opposite really. Usually he was caressing some part of her and speaking in a gentle, creepy, tone.

He slapped her again. Twice now. Gregory readied himself for a third, but Daniella reached up and snatched his wrist. Unwillingly she connected with him, peering into his mind and forcing both of them to relive some of his darkest memories...

-

A much younger looking Gregory McLaughlin stroked his son's curly hair as the pair read through a book. McLaughlin was patient with the boy, helping him pronounce each and every word that he struggled with. The boy tilted his head back, green eyes shining up at him.

A few years down the road, his son had a younger sister. A beautiful little thing. Full of life. The three of them were in black, and McLaughlin held their tiny hands in his as they all stared down at a grave. The name was blurred, at first, but eventually it came into focus. Natalie McLaughlin. Beloved mother and wife. Forever in our hearts.

Even after her death, Gregory taught his children. They inherited his smarts it seemed, excelling in their science and math classes and having enough sense to appreciate the arts that were long ago lost. Proteges. It wasn't enough though.
The images flashed quickly, children crying and screaming: pleading. He worked and worked, and slowly his children became more and more twisted. Inhuman. Unrecognizable. But they weren't done. They weren't perfect enough.

-

Gregory snatched his hand away from Daniella and stared at her incredulously. His shock quickly turned to anger. He had been made to relive all of that. To be reminded of his greatest disappointments.
"You killed them." Daniella choked, her eyes brimming with tears. Her head was still swimming, her ears ringing with the sound of Gregory's own children crying.
"No, no, no--"
"Your own children!"
"Shut up. Shut up." He had officially snapped, that much was apparent.
But Daniella was too shocked to process her current situation. It was horrible. But everything had been made so clear to her. She stood, shoving McLaughlin backwards with her thin arms. "You murdered them." She spat. "They were so full of life and you took that away from them." Daniella pushed him again.
"Shut. Up." Gregory snatched Dani's neck in his hand, forcing her into the wall. He pulled her forward abruptly, and again slammed her thin form into the metal. Every hit filled the girl with pain. She clawed at his hand, but no good came of it. Daniella shut her eyes tightly as she struggled to breath. Gregory was in a rage---apparently reliving the murder of his own children wasn't something that put him in a good mood. He repeated his action, making sure that every time he forced Daniella backwards her head hit the wall. After about five times she finally passed out, either from trauma or lack of air. Gregory didn't care. He dropped her and backed up, standing near the foot of her cot. Angrily he snatched the tray of food, furiously throwing it on the ground as he continued his tantrum.

---

It wasn’t long after her skirmish with McLaughlin that Daniella was prepped for her next round of experimentation. McLaughlin had even gone as far as to contact someone from Cyberteknik, but negotiations on that front weren’t going as quickly as he wished. And so here he was, moving along with his first round of new experimentation. Hopefully it wouldn’t be too long for some sort of deal to be arranged between Cyberteknik and himself…
There was little Daniella could do to stop the process of course, and eventually she found herself laying face down on some sort of table. Pumped with drugs, of course, that would cause a sort of paralysis---but McLaughlin had been extra vindictive as of late. There was no pain medication, none. Even before she’d been granted with a little, but it was clear now that Gregory’s intentions had altered a bit. They’d pulled her hair out of the way, and all she could be thankful for was that it hadn’t been cut. Her eyes closed, there was nothing she could do but wait. The thoughts around her murmured faintly, but they were hard to make sense of.

She felt the scalpel slice the back of her neck open, ripping gracefully through scar tissue and whatever else until Gregory and his team reached whatever they were looking for.

”Shh…” Daniella tried to calm herself, as well as ignore the pain. Eyes closed, she stared into the darkness. Eventually she was able to see a glimmer of herself. A reflection, but it was fleeting. She tried to chase after it to no avail…

Time passed slowly in the near comatose state she was in. She felt the skin of her neck being closed up, the needle pulling stitches through her skin. Her head ached, and she felt nauseous. Not that anyone would care. Even McLaughlin wouldn’t care now. Was it wrong of her to want him back to the way he was? Truthfully she didn’t want him around at all…but at least before he was not quite as terrible.


---

At some point she had been moved. Laying on her back on that familiar cold table. She could feel the pressure of her restraints, but still paralyzed there was nothing she could do. Groggy and pained, only being kept alive by an IV tube feeding her the nutrients she needed as she healed. What day was it? Daniella had no clue. The only thing that brought her out of the void was the faint sound of thoughts, every so often. So far off…Except one set of thoughts that was louder than the others. Due to proximity, which Daniella unfortunately knew was true. After all, she could still feel everything.

He lifted her, changed her, and even cleaned her. His own personal doll to play with. Gregory took his time taking care of Daniella as she healed. She was so lifeless, not a bit of movement. ”You’re much more complacent this way.” Daniella remembered him saying one day. Or was it just a few moments ago? She couldn’t tell. It all blurred together. She would feel his hands on her. Repeatedly. Groping and running along her figure. How many times she wasn’t sure. Sometimes she was nude, and other times she wasn’t. Sometimes he was gentle with her and other times his touch was filled with the anger he felt towards her. He kissed her, which she detested, especially when he would force his tongue into her mouth. She hated his warm breath, and how his beard felt. Sometimes he kissed her elsewhere: her neck, her shoulders, or her chest. She hated it all the same. Daniella remembered his hand reaching between her legs, and remembered wanting to cry or scream as he did what he wished: but she couldn’t. He did that more often lately…or was it lately? ”You’re not ready,” he had said, ”Your powers aren’t fully developed…But one day…We’ll be happy. You’ll see.” She hated him. Hated him. Hated him. ”I love you.” It was all continuous to her. A never-ending nightmare as she remained trapped within her own body. Her torture never seemed to stop. It was maddening. Full absence of free will. No where to run but to the recesses of her own mind.

At times she thought of Alister. She relived the moment that they’d met, playing the scene over and over if only to serve as a distraction from her torture. Other times she thought of Christian, and though it was a ridiculous thought she wished somehow he could just burst through the door and stop everything. Or that at least his father would. But that wouldn’t happen. It was a far away fantasy slipping through her fingers like sand. No one would come for her, and she knew it.
She thought about how nice it would be to kill Gregory. Her tormentor. The origin for all of her pain. It would be nice to put a bullet in his head. Or snap his neck. Or rip him limb from limb. To be free of him. To be free of, everything. To be free.

xxxxLocation :: Unknown GenEx Facility
xxxxCompany :: McLaughlin
xxxxHealth :: 90% - Recovering
xxxxTunes ::Technically Missing - Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross
xxxxAttire ::n/a

[The Smut Peddler]

ⓒⓞⓜⓜⓐⓝⓓⓔⓡ ⓝⓞⓥⓐ ⓥⓔⓖⓐⓢ

╰☆╮░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░╭☆╯





╭☆╯░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░╰☆╮

❝I stand beside the holy man
The monarchs fear my wrath
None may move the way I can
Ever the crooked path.❞

╔══════════════════════════════╗



Some days the guilt inside becomes too much to bear
I stopped seeking redemption I don't have, the will to care
I know I should be stronger, 'cause I think that's what you'd want
You'd be so ashamed if you could see the nothing I've become




╚══════════════════════════════╝

As the ship came in on its destination off in the distance in a dusty office sat a slender young redheaded man with his feet kicked up on his desk looking over the classifieds section of a monster truck magazine. From his unique characteristics it was no surprise that this was the brother of Nova Vegas, the resemblance almost uncanny. He turned his attention to a small blinking red light on his arm screen and pulled up the communicator. Sitting up he looked at a small image of a ship that was in range and looking to land. He smirked and hopped out of his seat before dusting himself off a bit and throwing on his varsity jacket while heading out to meet the ship at the landing strip. He moved with a brisk confident walk as he lit a cigarette before snapping his fingers as if to summon something.

By his side came a tall Greyhound of white color with a few large brown spots, she walked beside him as the two headed further through the dark channels until they reach a much larger opening. There they were in one of the deepest mines in the United States to date. The place was dark and eerie, and sent any electronic signals off as soon as it reached the bottom. Nothing but sheer stupidity was going to out his operation. A tower of a man stood before the landing strip and glanced over at the younger man as the ship came into view with a flat expression on his face, which in this moment meant he was disgruntled.

"Does your sister think your a God damned magician or something?" He asked rhetorically as the condition of the ship became more and more apparent with each passing second that it inched closer to them. The younger man, known as J'kr rolled his eyes, exhaling heavily the smoke as he sighed with great over exaggeration. His cigarette waving about in his hand as he spoke. "Apparently so..."

Both of their eyes were small like pinheads as they watched in both amusement and horror at the wreckage that had somehow catapulted itself from Luna to Earth, and how it had done so in the first place was beyond either of the two men. J'kr smirked as he moved his arm up and switched the entire hand out for a huge industrial sized electric power drill and started it whirring and prepping for action.

"Tch. At the very least I can say, the bird ain't bad lookin.' Damn shame she's been treated so poorly for so long, but we'll get her up and running in no time." He started to head up to the opening ship to reunite with his sister when news got out about the condition of the crew and he rushed in, shoving through and making his way to the med bay. He didn't need directions as this was a ship layout he was familiar with, once he reached the bay he made his way much less brute like as he quietly stood beside Nova's unconscious body. "Dammit. I heard about Pierce on the news leak, but I no idea..."

--

It had been about a week since their departure from New Armstrong, and while the injuries were healing and crew was getting stronger once more the young pink haired woman was still resting nearly lifeless on the makeshift bed inside the medical bay. The eye and optic nerve were beyond repair, it would be left as a solid orb and little else. Nova was lucky that the knife had not made worse damage to the frontal lobe, most of the brain injury, came from the blunt trauma of being slammed into the large man's knee than anything. She would remain in a comatose state for some while as inside she was very aware of the days that passed and those who tended to her wounds and visited her from time to time. Inside however a battle raged on, long and repetitive.

Nova stood in the darkness and in the distant nothingness she could see her, the woman, known as Lileth again. As she moved closer she could see that she had both her eyes covered in bandages and she was weeping. Nova would move her hand out to reach her, but the woman would stop her.

"I gave you everything I had to save him. And you still let him die..." The woman sprung to her feet and began choking the younger pink haired woman. Nova's hands pulled up to remove the woman from her but she was much more powerful and Nova was weak and unable to fight. "YOU LET HIM DIE!"

Nova pulled away and clasped her throat, breathing heavily. "I did no such thing. I did everything I could. And look what where it got me? An entire ship of people are practically dead! Because I asked for help saving him. It could have just been me. It didn't have to be all of them. Either way fate saw fit for him to die. There's no other way of slicing it. We did everything, and everything wasn't enough to save a life."

The older woman continued to attack and Nova did what she could to defend herself against the woman's powerful punches and kicks.

"How dare you! You gave up! He died, the blood is on your hands because you were too weak to save him!" The woman known as Lileth knocked Nova to the ground and continued to pound away at her. Nova accepted it for a moment, Lileth was right, this was how she felt. Until finally the pummeling had become too much and Nova threw Lileth off her, causing her to hit a wall of nothingness and behind her a bright gold light would shine through the cracks. Nova stood up and stared down her attacker. "I know who you are Lileth. I know it all now. You are my personal demon. Lilith: the other woman of man. The one drove away because she could not be subservient to him. They tried to make me into a looking glass for your mind. Cloned from you, to be you. But I am not you..."

The woman hissed as she got up from her place and began to fight once more. "No, you are just a failed attempt at being me, a carbon copy, and recast. A cheap knock off. You are afraid to be me."

"True." Nova paused as she looked at the woman getting ready to attack once more as she smirked. "And that will keep me from ever becoming you."

Before long Nova took her right hand a reached up to remove her eye. Blood trailing down as she smiled back at her reflection, who's bandages were beginning to bleed on one side.

"What are you doing?!?"
"From where I'm standing, we really don't look that much alike..." She said, pulling the bloody object forward and crumbling it in her hand as it turned to a glowing gold dust. "Now, isn't that better?"

Lileth convulsed as the blood soaked through the bandages and dripped to the ground. "STOP!"

Nova gave a suiting glare at the woman and stomped her foot on the ground, causing it to shatter and the brightness to raise in its wake. She stood tall as she watched the weeping form before her crumble into herself as the woman was defeated. Nova holding a firm stance, unwilling to soften at her sobs.

"I don't remember who I was yesterday, but what I do know is that from today forward, I will be the person I chose to be. And you will be dead from today forth." Nova looked at the woman as she began to chuckle, something in this appeared to be humorous to her. "Isn't it obvious by now? You can't kill me, I'm a part of you."

Nova moved over to the woman and embraced her as a bright explosion began to form from their connection. She hugged the woman who was writhing in pain. "Like you said, you are a fleeting memory, and I your fateful doppelganger. And if that's all you are, then the way to free you is simple."

The older of the two homunculi continued to weep as the bright nothingness consumed them both. Nova's green eye peered over at the other as she smiled. "I'll just learn to forget you..."

The build up of the explosion ceased for a moment, and then suddenly imploded into dark nothingness again as Nova saw that she was completely alone. She shared this space with no one. She would notice the silence and smile. She would no longer allow herself to be haunted by her own mind.

Moments later she opened her eyes to find herself back in the med bay. The sound of various beeps and chirps coming from everywhere as the people who remained were still in serious condition. She would notice a few familiar faces and frown, forcing herself to sit up as she could get a good look of everything around her. The heavy gauze wrapping around her head and eye made it apparent that it was still not completely healed. The crewman who was watching the medical bay jumped up as he saw Nova sitting there and began looking over her and her wounds. Chatting her up a bit as she responded to him rather cognitively.

--

It had been two months, and parts were slow getting to the site. J'kr was up to his neck in final touches and upgrades that the ship so desperately needed. He worked around the clock and diligently brought the old rust bucket up to his incredibly high standards. The engine was running beautifully, the wing and body damage was gone, and of course she could fly, and well now. J'kr was simply a perfectionist when it came to his jobs and so since they hadn't left yet he continued with minor improvements here and there to keep himself preoccupied. His sister on the other hand had been around and walking for about a month and a half, and that made his job a whole lot easier.

"I hope that'll help you guys out, Percy. That diffraction grate was killing your speed and putting a lot of unnecessary strain on the cockpit's glass. That was a ticking time-bomb..." He'd state, moving along back to the engine room and changing his arm out for a bolt stripper and fixing the worn bolts for easier, safer, and faster access for the next time it needed to be checked. "Thankfully we got that squared away."

On the other side of the ship Nova rested on the dock and stared out at the long dark cavernous depths of the mine. She had made her peace with Tiberius' passing and had even buried his coat with a few others of his personal belongings. Her brother insisting to take her shopping and had surprised her with a new outfit and one that suited her better than her old captain's coat.

The majority of the leather was a dark taupe with fabric and stitched gold accents along with the occasional dark brown suede belt or lining here or there. High boots, a long cape like shoulder coat, and a warm gold half top. She wore a well fitted three strap taupe leather eye patch that completely covered her eye and scar. Lined with gold trim and brass the patch gave her an almost sinister appearance. She wasn't ready to look at it herself and really had no intention for anyone else to either, it was huge and despite the talented medical help the mar was deep and ridged.

Most of her time spent on this little bit of downtime they had had was spent on personal reflection. She had cried until she couldn't anymore, drowned her miseries in the bottom of many liquor bottles, and finally she'd done it. The tranquil numbness of acceptance had consumed her, and she could finally start living again. Except that now there was another promise made that gnawed at the back of her mind. To pay for her own actions of high treason, and accept the path she had lead herself down.

She pulled a large bottle of whiskey up to her lips and downed herself another shot of self medication. How amazingly clear she could see, since losing her eye. There were no veils or tinted glasses in her way now, no, she could see the world for what it was. A world too cold, bitter, and jaded for the foolish dreams of a young youth.

Since the injury Nova had seemed to have grown a bit colder externally, whether it was from the harsh snap of reality or a way to cope with the things that stood before her was unknown. She was always watching around the ship, like a faithful watchdog, keeping track of people and what needed done. But to keep herself busy she worked on something that was completely foreign to her, learning how to fight with her new handicap. Which started with learning to adjust her depth perception with target practice on her new earpiece single sided HUD, however, the task was tedious as well as frustrating to the young pink haired woman. She groaned in defeat as the simulator showed her another failing score, she sat her head back and wondered how the rest of the crew was doing. She had heard that Alister was doing much better, and unfortunately she'd yet the courage face him. The last time she'd seen him he was missing an arm barely clinging to life in the medical bay. It sickened her, and it reminded her of the death that was looming overhead. She'd not the strength of will nor the heart to face a broken man, when she could barely keep herself together as she drowned in her own self pity. She hoped that his time with Roisin was doing him well, and from the things she picked up by the crew, it was. It seemed almost as though there was the slightest bit of normality returning to the crew, but Nova knew very well that this was simply the eye of the storm. Nothing else. And that did not sit well with her as she pulled up the bottle of whiskey once more and took another shot.

╔══════════════════════════════╗



And I can't bring myself to say goodbye
I walk with my head up say I'm fine, but that's a lie
Your face will always haunt me it's my comfort and my curse
And I can't imagine any feeling could be worse...

...Than this Goodbye



╚══════════════════════════════╝

❝...Checkmate❞

xxxx┇ ✦ Ship // J'kr's chop shop
xxxx┇ ♢ 75%
xxxx┇ ✦ Emotionally withdrawn
xxxx┇ ✦ 21 Guns

[chibichick27]

▌OUTFIT ●●● J'kr's Shop ▌MOOD ●●● contemplative, peaceful, understanding ▌SONG ●●● "Clint Eastwood" - The Gorillaz ▌LOCATION ●●● Earth - J'kr's Chop Shop




A pair of dark blue eyes concentrated heavily on the thermostat. Getting a spaceship’s internal temperature to set right had the ease of manipulating an old-school radiator into not creaking every time heat passed through it. The temperature slowly ticked down, each degree settling in and cooling the room just a little more. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, the blessed plaque read sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, and the room became so much more livable. ”Yes! Finally! Sixty-eight degrees!” Kenway shouted, pumping his fist in the air in victory. ”This is the best day of my life, and I wish I was kidding you, but I cannot tell you how many times I’ve woken up in the middle of night burning up, and whenever I tried to adjust the temperature, Lissy would just complain that it was an icebox. But now it’s perfect. That J’kr is one awesome dude.”

Kenway turned and looked at Alexei with a grin. She smiled back as he walked over and sat next to her on the bed, watching her lace up her boots with gold spikes adorning the heels. ”What is…you’re going away? After a miracle of nature has occurred? Okay, so it’s not nature. It’s people kicking the crap outta nature and telling it what temperature it should be.” The brown-haired man pulled Alexei into him. Her eyes widened and she smiled as she fell into him, and he snuggled his nose into the little space between her neck and shoulder. ”Where are you going?” he asked with a little whine in his voice, speaking cutely to her in a manner no one else would see. The raven-haired woman made a gesture, indicating opening a door. ”Outside? Into the mine? I don’t know. Should you really be breathing in that dust, or those fumes?” Kenway asked with concern. Alexei gave him a reassuring smile, then a playful pat on the head, before planting a kiss on his lips and darting away. Kenway leaned back on his bed, smiling, and once she was gone, rolled over and went back to the handheld game he was playing. Little moments like these were more cherished by him and Alexei more than ever before. Especially considering past events.

TWO MONTHS AGO…

Alexei woke with a start, her eyes rebooting harshly as the light blinded her white rather than black. Her mouth opening, drawing in heavy breaths, she expected to see Dominick’s hulking figure brandishing the syringe and tearing her throat out. But no, she was in…a ship? The Persephone! Yet her head was swimming, and she felt incredibly weak. A figure looked over her, a woman with white hair, red marks, and then a medical robot. No one was making any noise, it seemed, for everything was muffled like a hand against a stereo, the soft thrum hurting her head. Unfortunately, it all came crashing into her as the voices raised, and she heard screaming, crying, the sounds of loss and utter ruin surrounding her. She struggled to get up, but the woman—Róisín!—pushed her back down and administered something that brought her back into darkness, though a particularly more peaceful one.

When she next woke, it was to yelling. She heard Alister arguing with Róisín, but not in the way she was used to hearing from the captain. No, it was broken, bitter, and the anger seemed but a placeholder for emptiness. Alexei saw Nova, saw her face mangled and broken. She saw Ella tending to Zacharais, she saw Octavian and Jin, she saw Marcus. But most of all, Alexei saw hopelessness. And when she tried to speak, to let them know she was there for them, she couldn’t make a sound. Her hand weakly moved to her throat, fingers brushing against bandages gently wet with blood. Swallowing suddenly became that much more difficult and painful to her. She looked over at a button crudely taped to her side, and pushed it deliriously. A familiar warmth overcame her, flooding her system with comfort and a pleasant sleepiness. She let out a small sigh of happiness as the morphine calmed her, and she slipped into sleep.

Not only had Dominick robbed her of her voice, but also any attempt she had made to keep her body clean. By pumping her full of the methamphetamine, he had effectively destroyed the hard work she had put into her cleanse. A day seemed like child’s play to most, but to an addict, being able to overcome that itch every hour to satisfy the craving was a huge step. And though it didn’t mean anything close to the end of said cravings, it meant something nonetheless. But her condition required her to be on medications. Alexei had managed to convey to Róisín and Ella to put her on less, but the pain ached her so that she would hit the morphine button until it broke. Rhia had needed to watch over her in those trying days, when she’d wake up in the middle of the night, silently screaming and covered in sweat, cursing herself mentally to keep her from rifling through the precious stocks and fattening her mind and her addiction with a high.

It would be a long process for Alexei’s body to heal, especially when she decided to swear off medication completely after being deemed well enough to return to her cabin. Kenway had been waiting for her, and he provided her with much-needed company. Normally, after mission failure such as that, she would want to be left alone, even if Dominick wouldn’t allow her that. But she needed someone at that moment. A lot of guilt weighed heavily on her mind. Dominick’s mere presence freezing her into near submission. Losing the chance to help Alister, and now, he had no arm and no will to keep going. Tiberius’ neck snapped on a rope, Nova’s face torn open by the man she used to call a lover. And gods knew what he had done to Daniella and Christian, whose lack of presence onboard the ship bothered her terribly. Daniella; she had pledged to protect the girl, and now she was gone. Lethe assisting their former enemy, Dominick being alive…it was too much. Alexei had felt a camaraderie with the people onboard the Persephone, and now her former masters had returned to remind her that she would never be free as long as they lived. And they would hurt anyone who tried to take her from them.

Alexei squirmed uncomfortably, Rhia staring her down from above a magazine page as she became shifty. A hit sounded good at that moment…but the older woman’s stare prevented her from moving.

PRESENT…

Careful to avoid tripping over a rock settled in the dust, Alexei stepped out into the mine. J’kr’s chop shop was in a strange place, that was for sure. Quietly as usual, she walked around the outside of the ship, looking at it and noticing, that even with her nonexistent knowledge of ships, the Persephone looked a thousand times better. I’m sure she’s happy about that, she thought about the AI as she stepped around a side. "That was a ticking time-bomb...Thankfully we got that squared away." J’kr spoke from around the bend. Alexei enjoyed the view of his muscles and bronze skin and piercing eyes. Also, she liked the way his ears and tail looked on him. If it had been three months ago, she would have attempted to jump his bones with no qualms. But things had changed in so many ways. Instead, she let him know with a small smirk that she liked what she saw, but she kept on walking until she found his sister.

Nova seemed taller these days, and Alexei had to admit she was impressed with the woman’s adjustment to having only one eye. Still, looking at her now Alexei filled up with guilt she had tried to quash the past few months. Alexei had managed to convey to Kenway who Dominick was, and as far as she knew, he was the only person who knew of their connection. The rest of the crew just assumed he was a madman hired by Halloran as muscle. They didn’t even know of his connection to Lethe. None of this secrecy was on purpose, but Alister hadn’t been in the mood for visitors and guilt, mixed with other feelings she couldn’t quite lock down, prevented her from seeing him. Perhaps she could have conveyed it to Will, whom she was supposed to be watching over, but he seemed off with his own agenda, and now that Daniella wasn’t with them anymore she couldn’t fathom what his game was. All she could do was take note that he hadn’t tried to kill anyone in the crew’s weakest hour. In all honestly, she’d been distracted from everything lately, and perhaps she wasn’t fulfilling her duties as much as she could have in this time of rest. But other concerns were weighing on her mind, and her hand absentmindedly traveled over her stomach as she fell into thought.

ONE WEEK AGO…

Alexei couldn’t handle it. She twisted over in bed, her feet hitting the floor loudly as she rushed to the bathroom. Kenway woke with a start, feeling her arm jut into his stomach when she got up. ”Nmmh—ugh what? ‘Lexei? What time is it…” he mumbled. He heard the sound of vomit hitting the toilet and he shot straight up and into the bathroom. Alexei shuddered soundlessly above the toilet, dripping in sweat. Kenway gently ran his hand around her back as she continued to vomit, and he brought her a bottle of water after she brushed her teeth. It had been happening more frequently the past few weeks, the withdrawal symptoms. They’d taken a turn for the worse. Alexei would be hit with waves of nausea, followed by random bouts of extreme exhaustion where she’d end up sleeping half the day away, only to wake up covered in sweat and puke some more. Eventually, she had to stop eating large meals and just have snacks throughout the day, and limited snacks at that because most breakfast foods just made her stomach churn even worse. Kenway remembered making her an eggs benedict breakfast, complete with orange juice, toast, and salmon. She had taken one look at it, smiled happily, and then five minutes later grew horribly nauseous and ended up eating only the toast.

What was strange, however, is that the pains most commonly associated with withdrawal, for the most part, had subsided. So, shakily combing her hair and feeling more tired than ever, Alexei decided to go see Róisín for a full physical. However, the more delicate Skeleton Harvester was not there, having gone off for one reason or another. Ella offered to do the physical, instead, that being something she could definitely do without assistance. ”I’ll be in the training room. Captain asked me to spar with him. I hope he doesn’t accidentally knock my teeth out with that new gizmo of his,” Kenway joked about the arm, before planting a kiss on Alexei’s forehead. ”You’re strong. You’ll be fine. Probably just stress or something.” He heard a crackle on his comm, and as he walked away Alexei could hear him talking to Alister. ”Yeah, yeah, I’m coming! s**t, you know it’s Sunday right? I should be leading Bible study right now…no, I’m actually not kidding. But we took the week off…of course we don’t invite you to Bible study. You’d send us all straight to Hell in two minutes!” he laughed in the distance.

As for the physical itself, it didn’t seem particularly taxing. After about an hour of waiting, Ella called Alexei to her with a look on her face that didn’t seem to convey only one thing—it was worry, surprise, happiness, all clashing in an indescribable stare. ”Well, uh, Alexei. Miss Santogold. I never know if I should be formal or not with this sorta thing…Alexei. It seems your withdrawal symptoms have pretty much subsided, to be honest. You’re past the worst part, and congratulations on that. But…” she paused, trying to search for the best way to put it. ”Well…” Alexei blinked a few times. So then what’s wrong with me? Am I actually sick with something? the Martian’s heart sank a little in worry. Ella let out a long breath, before smiling, and then looking serious, and finally settling on something in between the two. ”You…are…well, Alexei, you are two months pregnant.” She paused to let those words sink in. Alexei’s eyes widened. If she could speak, she would have yelled. What? That’s impossible. No way. I can’t…wait, really? I… she looked down at her stomach. Ella gave a faint smile, which she replaced quickly with a dire look. ”If I’m reading this correctly, it was conceived anywhere from February 3rd through the 5th. Which means you were pregnant on New Armstrong.” Fear gripped Alexei. That means I was pregnant when Dominick…and during the medical procedures, and the drugs, and…oh no. Oh no, please tell me it’s okay. Please. She stared down at the floor, unable to really focus on anything. Never before had she ever contemplated having a child. While she dreamed of one day being free of Lethe and being free to be with her family always, it never occurred to her that she could make one of her own. Tears welled up in her eyes, at first of just plain shock from the news. Then, fear that the baby was hurt. Then, happiness that she was having one. Fear, happiness, fear, happiness, terror, shock, joy, pain, euphoria. ”To put your mind at ease, though, what you’re going through is a completely normal thing during the pregnancy period. And while I can’t assure you of the baby’s health…well, I can say that nothing else has given me cause for concern. Of course I’ll keep this completely confidential. Congratulations, Alexei, you’re going to be a mother. I think the first one onboard, too.”

PRESENT...

Alexei sat by Nova, staring out into the mines. Perhaps the woman offered her some whiskey, but she declined with a soft wave of her hand and shake of her head, before giving Nova a weak smile. She’d been through a lot. Alexei tapped her goggles, as if to ask why Nova didn’t just get a cybernetic eye, but she think she knew the answer to that. Adapting to change without ‘cheating’, if one could call it that. Alexei looked down at her body, her eyes rolling over the tiniest heat signature, and she smiled genuinely before looking back out at the mines. Oh, how she wished Daniella was here, and even Christian. How she wished things hadn't gone the way they did on New Armstrong. But, it had happened, and so here they were, on Earth, slowly putting back together the pieces of their broken beings.

[Kagome SB]

ᴏᴄᴛᴀᴠɪᴀɴ ｗｈｉｔｅxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
ⓤⓝⓘⓣⓨxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
TRAITOR ←xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

〈xAND IS THIS SUPPOSED TO MATCH
the darkness that you felt???
I never meant for you to FIX YOURSELFx〉
✕ ✕xxxxxxx
〈x some legends are told
some turn to DUST or to GOLD
BUT YOU WILL REMEMBER ME,
remember me for CENTURIESx〉







In just a few hours, everything had changed. And as if to reflect that change, time didn’t seem to work properly. The moments Jin spent piloting Persephone safely away from New Armstrong, crew members screaming and bleeding or not responding at all as they were carried to the medical bay by those with more strength—those moments seemed to happen so quickly. He remembered catching Octavian’s eye, watching Marcus help him as he limped off deep into the ship. They exchanged a glance, a happy one, to see that both of them were alive. Róisín had gone to create a distraction, to ensure Jin the safety of getting away without being tailed. He remembered growing nervous as she left, wondering if she would return. And when she did, and everything settled down, time just stopped being so fast. Each hour of each day ticked down slower and slower, the melancholy of the crew permeating the air. Jin found out what had happened to Octavian. What he had did—how he had turned against the Dominion and Coalition both in order to show people what was wrong. “You know you do not have to be a part of this,” Octavian had said to him one day, as Ella applied fresh gauze to his back. “You can return to the Barzakh. Say that I manipulated you. They would believe you, I am sure of it.” Jin just shook his head and gave his older friend a small smile. ”You’re really the only person I have. I wouldn’t have anybody to go back to. I mean, sure, the crew would be happy to see me, but it’s not the same. I can’t, well, talk to them the way I can with you." And so that was that.

To be honest though, there was another reason lurking in the back of the young pilot’s mind. Something he didn’t quite understand. He found himself in the medical bay a lot, even after Octavian had stopped receiving check-ups. It really was to see Róisín, to watch her work. He never tried to be a bother; usually, he’d just watch her do her thing, and if he felt she wasn’t particularly happy with his presence, he’d disappear back to his quarters. But there was something about her; he saw a beautiful woman racked with anger at everything around her. Her circumstances, her choices, Alister’s choices. He’d witnessed her tell Alister to suck it up. He’d been one of the people clapping at seeing the pirate come to his senses again. And when she had yelled for everyone to leave the room, Jin lingered and even managed the smallest of smiles when her eyes fell on him before he also left the room. Her growl reminded him of the prelude to her vicious attacks against the Dominion soldiers that had infiltrated the ship. It scared him, a little, but he also found it, in a weird way, comforting. Because she had saved his life. Taken a bullet for him. And she had basically patched the crew up, without asking for anything. Sure, she was a complicated woman, but sometimes, Jin noticed a look she would get that reminded him of Octavian’s face. When they were both reminded of what they were. It was sad. And Jin didn’t want Róisín to be sad.

So, he set about finding a gift for her. It wasn’t easy, but luckily being on a pirate ship meant pretty much everything in the galaxy was available if you knew where to look. So Jin, gift in hand, headed over to the medical bay to see Róisín. She’d been gone for a few days, and he was happy to see her back. SARA II buzzed around the room. ”Hi, SARA!" Jin greeted the robot brightly. Perhaps because it wasn’t a living thing, but that made it easier to talk to. He realized, as he approached Róisín, that his stomach was turning over into knots. Suddenly the distance between them seemed like a canyon, and his hands became a little sweaty as he clutched the little gift. Stop it, Jin. Get over it, c’mon, you can do this. Just say thanks and hand it to her. Don’t worry about it so much. Trembling a little, he walked up to her. ”Um, h-hi there Róisín," Jin mumbled, trying very hard to look her in the eye but mostly staring at the ground. Taking a deep breath, he managed to weave more words, albeit in a less than confident manner. ”I uh, well, I just wanted to s-say, uh, thank you. For everything you’ve done. I-It seems like you’ve been working a lot l-lately. Hope you’ve been able to have s-some time to yourself. That’s important," he stuttered, managing to grow a little more confident as he looked at the beautiful woman. He looked down at the package sheepishly. ”A-Anyway, I got this for you. I hope you like it. A-At first I was like “what should I get her? S-She’s already got a freezer for” well u-um you know and then I thought “can she eat normal food? Does she like chocolate?” but I wasn’t sure so then I was like “maybe something like flowers” but I don’t really think it’s that easy to get flowers shipped to a pirate ship…I’m rambling. I’m sorry."

Jin paused, took another breath, and then held out the gift. It was in a small black box, adorned with a little green bow. Upon her opening it, he explained what it was. ”I-It’s a cell that’ll change Karl’s color. I-I don’t know if he already has one, but he’s always green so I thought maybe he’d like to be another color sometimes. It’s got a whole bunch to choose from. I-I hope I found the right one. I mean, he’s been pretty unhappy lately so I thought this would cheer him up. T-Though I guess that means it’s more of a gift for him, not you…" Jin realized, panicking a little. ”But I didn’t mean that! I just know you spend all of your time with him, when you can. It’s nice to have a friend like that. Someone who will always be there. A-Anyway, I hope you like it. You…you’re great. So, you deserve gifts. And things like that. I-I’m gonna leave you alone, then. L-Let you get back to work," Jin finished nervously, though he did linger a little to see her reaction. He really hoped he hadn’t missed the mark.

The woman was busy checking over SARA II’s reports, keeping tabs over how many crew members were still recovering and who still needed some of the stretched pain medication to get through their days. It had been a while since she had slept, though the adrenaline of bustling from bed to bed helped to prolong her fatigue. It was almost too easy to miss Jin’s meek voice amongst all the monitor noises and groaning. What managed to capture the femme fatale’s attention was when the tiny tone mentioned he had a gift for her. She was speechless, confused even, and her dumbfounded expression lasted well into the woman’s retrieval of the box. She stared at the little bow for a bit, noticing the choice of colors and wondering just where he had managed to find something so dainty amongst a group of brutish pirates. Her refined fingertips lifted the lid, placing it within her palm before they reached in and plucked out a small device. She turned it this way and that, inspecting it from every angle as Jin explained to her what it was. She didn’t have the heart to tell him that Karl had chosen not only his color scheme but also his aquatic model long ago. The sheer size of the object would never have fit into his design. Still, it was a gift, and the only gift she had ever received. Her expression was calm, surreal even, as she thanked the pilot and closed the box back up, deciding to put an alternate use to the light based machinery.

To hear a thank you from Róisín was all Jin needed to hear. He brightened at her words and blushed a little, eyes darting to the ground before picking back up. Even if it turned out to be something Karl couldn’t use, he was just glad that she had appreciation for it. ”You’re welcome," he replied, words clearer and confident. ”Like I said, I’ll let you get back to work. See you around, Róisín." Jin gave her a smile, and headed out of the medical bay to sit in the cockpit. Auto-pilot might have been re-established, but Persephone was helping him relight the control board. And he did that for days, keeping himself busy so he didn't think about Róisín being gone from the ship or Octavian being so busy figuring out the rebellion's status.

x – x

“Which is why I, as a ranked man of the Dominion, declare Rear Admiral Kenneth Halloran unfit for duty…and I ask him to step down, peacefully and with grace.”

As soon as those words had left Octavian’s mouth, he knew he had just branded himself a traitor. For he knew Halloran would not step down, but he could not stoop to the man’s level and execute him without trial and jury. The crowd had supported him, mostly, as had a good number of the Dominion soldiers present. That had been enough for him to know that his words had not fallen on deaf ears. For years, he had faithfully served the Coalition and the Dominion both, even after GenEx signed his death warrant. He thought he could continue to be the good soldier, the leader men and women aspired to be, even among sickness and fear. And, for the most part, he had been that man. A Dominion man people should try to be. But Halloran did not want those people. He wanted drones, chess pieces to manipulate to knock over everything between him and power. Octavian could not allow people to continue to accept that, to accept the Dominion as authority, until they saw what was beyond GenEx’s annual vaccinations at the children’s hospitals. What was beyond Cyberteknik’s security system installations for safer homes. What the Coalition chose to include in its ranks as good and true soldiers.

Yet, as days went by and Octavian watched himself speak to Halloran, the remaining feed of the entire event having gone viral across the galaxy, he did not feel reassured. Because he knew what his actions had wrought. A rebellion, and the Dominion specialized in quelling those.

The first thing he did was establish the general safety of Unity as a corporation. He had very little communication with anyone outside of the Persephone crew, who had begun to view him very differently after they saw Octavian put himself (metaphorically speaking) between Alister and Halloran’s fatal blow. Their captain, who had brought the man onboard as a prisoner, who had tortured him. And Octavian had not let that get in the way of his decision. While he didn’t quite fit in with everyone because, traitor or not, he was still very respectful, honorable, and more tightly wound than the rest, he didn’t feel like daggers were being glared into him whenever he passed. In fact, a few ladies of the crew had begun to giggle at his presence. Perhaps they wanted to live out a sort of ‘sleeping with the enemy’ fantasy. Octavian just gently ignored their flirtations and went on his way.

It didn’t seem right to use Alister’s ship as a base of operations to figure out what was happening on the Dominion side of things. Unfortunately, those who had become a part of the rebellion knew he was on the Persephone, and since Unity enjoyed keeping tabs on its pirate ships, some had sent him scrambled messages. Being very careful not to introduce a bug into the system, Octavian figured out that a good number of Coalition soldiers had taken up arms and joined the IAH. Unity was being investigated thoroughly by the Executive Board, and the few GenEx members who tried to defect mysteriously disappeared. Octavian had a sinking feeling they’d been turned into monsters. But—perhaps in a rare bout of immaturity—what frustrated him the most is who they all seemed to rally around to get the word to their inspiration soldier.

”…Right, well, that’s really all I have for you at this moment in time. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a date with a lovely bottle of Beefeater,” Fleet Captain Thomas Bishop spoke in the video screen, already nursing an empty bottle of extremely cheap gin. Octavian scowled as the man nearly tripped over himself getting up to go to the enormous and well-stocked bar in his cabin.
“I am surprised you managed to remember all of that. Are you sure you did not leave anything out? Or is the drink assuring you that you have said it all?” the brown-haired man replied, leaning back in his chair and sighing as Thomas began drinking straight from the bottle. ”You...are an arsehole, Octy. An absolute, hairy and unhappy arsehole. But apparently everybody loves you, though. So righteous and honorable and all that shite. Just bloody, ********’, I dunno, all in a tizzy about your rebellion.” Thomas hiccuped, slamming the Beefeater down and staring at the screen. Octavian watched the older Fleet Captain’s eyes become unfocused until he gave himself a little slap. “I hate that nickname, Thomas. And your colorful language is appreciated, but does speak volumes about why Halloran’s men have not come sniffing at your door. All they would find is alcohol and idiocy.” Of all the men who had to be the spokesperson for Octavian, why did it have to be this one? He had known Thomas ever since he first joined the Coalition, and they had gotten along solely because they always ended up in the same place. A mangled ‘friendship’ that was also a total rivalry, mixed with distaste for each other’s habits and an extremely complicated personal matter that threatened to boil to the surface during each call. Octavian didn’t understand how Thomas was able to be a successful Fleet Captain under all of that booze, sex, gambling, and suspension papers, and according to Thomas, Octavian had no idea how to enjoy anything. Few people tried Octavian’s temper, but Thomas could send him into a fury. ”Oh, ******** off. I already explained my actions at New Armstrong to them in my interrogation. I told them the truth—that I saw a Lethe b*****d attacking a civilian during the chaos, and I told him to stop, and then he came at me with deadly force, so I returned the favor with deadlier force. And then some soldiers tried to stop me, and really it was deadly force all over the place. They gave me a week suspension. Not the worst I’ve had, considering I’m ******** aiding and abetting a rebellion without them noticing. I suppose it’s because they are convinced I hate your guts. Which, I ever so slightly do. Oh, speaking of guts and hating, my ex-wife is calling me. ******** fantastic.” Thomas had begun smoking a cigarette at this point, and was blowing smoke straight into the screen, which further annoyed Octavian. Of course, he was doing it on purpose. “Tell Sonia I say hello. Also remind her that leaving you was the best decision she could have ever made.” ”A decision you helped right on along you arsehole. Goddamn, bloody, ******** p***k-fingering ******** arsehole shite-bag—”

Octavian had terminated the call by that point. Talking to Thomas—especially a drunk Thomas (and really, when was he ever not drunk?)—had soured his mood, and the mention of Sonia had not helped. He thought about the sweet woman, a close friend for years, and how she had chosen Thomas in their little friend group and made the biggest mistake of her life. How, years ago, she had seen this mistake, and had come to Octavian for comfort, and—

Banishing the thoughts from his head, he wandered out of his room and headed to the captain’s cabin. It had been a strangely long time since he had actually spoken to Alister. They had exchanged brief words during recovery time in the med bay, where Octavian had noticed Róisín’s mild interest in his blood after it burned Ella’s hand during a fix-up. But, for the most part, the Captain had been absent from the rest of the crew until the past few days. Octavian passed by two female crew members. They smiled at him as he passed and began whispering to each other. He was polite, but had no time to deal with more flirtations as he knocked on the door. No answer. It then occurred to Octavian that perhaps Alister would be figuring out how his arm worked. So, he headed to the training room, where he found the pirate working with his new arm. Octavian was not a fan of cybernetics, but he had to admit, Róisín’s work was impressive. He leaned against the doorway, watching for a little bit before speaking up. “The new arm seems to be working with you just fine,” he observed, his Southern drawl crawling into the room. “…Your crew is happy to see you back on your feet. Inspires them, a little. Two months have passed, and it is about time that melancholy was lifted.” Octavian had a stern expression, but he knew that the confidence of a crew was contingent on the captain. He had been in those shoes several times. “…It is a family, truly it is. Funny. I suppose I never saw it that way before,” he spoke, pacing around the room a little and looking at the training equipment. “Even though both of us have crews, I only thought my way could possibly be the only way. The Barzakh was my family, and your Persephone was just a band of degenerates. Well…I say ‘have’, but I do not have my crew anymore.” That saddened him. He noticed a punching bag, and gave it a few strong punches. “My contact, Fleet Captain Bishop, says Fleet #4 was scattered, put onto different ships. That is not so bad. Yvonne and Kyra were probably kept together, so they will be annoying each other no matter what. Hawkins they probably gave to Fleet #7. That fleet is always so disorganized. Jin would have hated it, though. Being thrust into something unfamiliar,” Octavian said, partially talking to himself and to Alister. He punched the bag one last time, and a tremor of pain ran through his body. Octavian began to cough, trembling a little as he did so. He sat himself down on a bench and pulled out a handkerchief to control himself. “It occurs to me, Captain Blood, that I never asked you permission to stay onboard your ship. I suppose this is two months too late, but, if you would have me...I suppose I have become a pirate, of sorts, myself, sailing the stars with no real home. Though, as per the terms of our agreement, I was to return to you if Captain Pierce died. So, in retrospect, I have not violated any terms,” he tried at a bit of light humor, though Tiberius’ death did weigh on him. “Although, I took a cabin instead of going back to the cells. So I am dishonorable in that regard,” he added with a little smile. He coughed some more, and upon pulling the cloth away from his lips, one could see it was stained with flecks of blood. Two months, after all, was too much time for the man, for while most people it was a fleeting moment of their life, it was nearly a fourth of the time he had left.


۞ ۞ ۞ ۞ ۞


WITH: video call to Thomas >> Alister (Jin: Róisín) || LOCATION: the Persephone || HEALTH: 85% - coughing up blood || MISSION/OBJECTIVE: to get a better handle on his rebellion || OOC: ---

[Sir Dietary Supplement]

　　　　　*＆THAT`S ⊹ WHY WE ON`T BACK DOWN !　━━━━
　　　　　　　　YEAH `CAUSE THESE ARE THE THINGS　THAT WE CAN`T DENY THAT`S WHY WE STICK　TO YOUR GAME PLANS AND PARTY LIVES
　　　　　　　　YEAH `CAUSE THESE ARE THE THINGS　THAT WE CAN`T DENY THAT`S WHY WE STICK　TO YOUR GAME PLANS AND PARTY LIVES
xxx
　██　 ██　 ██　 ██　❛ so catch me ↯ IF I FALL₀₂





____two months ago

"Jesus Christian..." Prudence muttered as she walked into his room. The fear toxin was mostly worn off, some mild effects still happened. Christian did have to be restrained for the doctors to check any part of him. He seemed to physical relax more upon seeing Prudence however. "That guy really did a number on you. Even ruined your nose," she set a rather large assortment of colorful 'Get Well,' balloons at the foot of the bed, the bouquet of flowers set on a table with a few others that had been dropped off. She kicked a seat next to Christian's bed and plopped down. She took in Christian's appearance, the restraints that kept him at bay in case he suffered and episode, or just so the doctors could give him medications he needed to flush the toxin from his system. She offered him a weak smile, raising a hand to push his hair out of his face. "Its good to see you though, how are you feeling?"

Christian looked over at Prudence. Her red hair pulled back into a messy bun, she was colorfully dressed as always. A simple black pencil skirt, topped with a striking teal blouse. A deep red blazer over that with a pair of matching deep red heels. A large tan purse on her lap and an array of jewelry finished off the outfit. It was good to see her, a friendly face amongst everyone else. An ally was he was forced to stick around people he didn't trust. "I failed," he had scattered memories of what happened. He remembered Dani, she was trying to calm him, she kept him safe from Erebos. Only to be struck down. He briefly remembered seeing Nova before the fear overtook him again. Drove him back into the farthest terrors of his mind.

Prudence pressed her lips together. She had heard plenty about one Daniella Pearson, the experiment that was caught alongside Christian. She was deemed dangerous, yet Prudence knew otherwise. Even in Christian's fear filled stated, he always looked for Daniella. He asked if she was okay, she if made it out of that mess alive. So, Prudence did her own research into it all, digging up some rather grim truths about the company that Christian would one day run. "You didn't fail Christian. You just ended up getting in over your head. You survived. Grow from this," she told him simply. Prudence looked over as a knock from the door. Christian Bernet Senior stepped in. Looking over at Prudence and then to Christian.

"Leave, I wish to speak to my son alone," Prudence glanced over at Christian, he gave her a curt nod. Prudence walked over to the door and turned back to look over at Christian. "I'll get you something you like for lunch."

Prudence soon left him and his father alone. The man glanced towards the variety of fluids that were being pumped into his son. IV, the medication to draw the fear toxin out, a morphine drip. He pressed his lips together and ran a hand through his hair. "God damn it Christian. What the hell were you thinking," the mans tone held a variety of emotions. While it seemed to be mostly filled with relief that his son was back and alive. It was clear he was disappointed, agitated, confused, and surprised at the actions he son took. "You could of been killed out there. What the hell were you doing with that....that thing that McLaughlin made."

Thing. He spoke of Daniella like she was nothing, like she was a danger. Christian gave a dry glance towards his father. "Thing? She has a name. Daniella and she saved my life in return for me saving hers. You know nothing of what I did or why I did it."

His father scoffed and crossed his arms over his chest. "Enlighten me then, why did you do it? Why did you chose to betray everything you know."

"I didn't betray anything. I was doing what was right. She wanted out, to see the world and be free. To get away from...that man. You know what is going on isn't right and yet you fund it. Those are humans, dad. Living breathing people. Just like me and you let someone experiment on them. To live as nothing more than a set of results. Its wrong. I am going to change that, it is already changing."

"You'll make the company fall."

"So be it then."

"I will not allow it," a growl of irritation left his father. The man stepped away from the bed, pacing the length of a room for a moment. "You still don't understand it Christian. Everything I have done, I did to keep us going. To keep this company afloat and for you to live a good life. So you didn't have to live like everyone else. And you are willing to just throw it all away from some stupid....freak of a nature!"

"You did it for yourself. Mom would of never wanted this, you know that. Yet you had to of had this going while she was alive. Lets these things go on. You taught to me to live by my morals. The morals you taught me. That GenEx was there to help people. We were there to make them feel better. All that time...you had these programs. You made people into...abominations. You let them go through torture and for what?"

"To keep us on top."

Christian shook his head and stared at the ceiling. "Your pathetic father."

"I am? I wasn't the one tagging along some pirate to save the life of a freak. But, that should be the least of my worries. That pirate it probably dead and that freak is back where she belongs. Locked up where McLaughlin can take care of her."

Christian's jaw tightened. "Shut up. You know nothing of Alister. He was more than some pirate. He had morals that you ever did. He would of never let people suffer like you do. Dani...Dani deserves to be free."

His father walked to the bed and looked down at Christian. "Where do you come from, thinking you can speak to me like that. You should know your place. Whether you like it or not, I still have a say over things. It is because of me you aren't hiding in some corner waiting for something to kill you. The condition they found you in...and you act like those people were your friends. They left you to rot. You were found alone and scared. Caught in the crossfire they said. No was looking for you Christian. They didn't care. Mr. Blood just wanted your money. Daniella wanted to use you to get her freedom. Now look at them."

Silence fell over the room. "I may not be fully aware of what happened on New Armstrong. But what I do know, is that Alister Blood was upholding honor. Dani tried to save me, along with someone else. Don't lie to me father. I am not some idiot."

"I would disagree with that."

"Of course you would. You think you are right. Deep down you know what is going on is wrong. You are just to greedy to see it. To see that your son suffered at the hands of those you ordered. At your hands."

"My only order for them to obtain you. I didn't care about that freak. I cared about my son."

"You cared about your company. The only reason you wanted me back was so I could carry on the legacy of Christian Bernet. Sorry to disappoint. But, I plan to make things my own. Even if it means the company will fall."

It seemed to be a ticking point for his father. The man's jaw tightened, his hand turned into a fist. He pulled himself away from Christian's bedside, slamming his hands down against a table. "You are a selfish child. Living a fantasy. Wake up Christian. This is what you have to do, this is what you will grow into. Whether you like it or not. This is your future."

"No. Its yours, but I'm exhausted. I ask you nicely to leave. The bad thoughts are coming back to my head and I feel like its all your fault."

"Whatever Christian. At least you are alive, I am thankful for that, but you can't seem to see that your father was just worried about you. Rest up."

____one month ago

"Prue, I need a favor from you," he walked over to the secretary's desk. "I need you to track me a ship, this has to be done off the radar. My father or any of his..." Christian looked over at his new bodyguard. A rather intimidating looking man in an expensive suit. He was busy reading a book, but he was Christian's bodyguard and babysitter. He made sure that Christian did run away again. His gaze fell back to Prudence. "The ship is the Persephone, it belongs to Alister Blood. When you find it, get back to me."

Since his recovery, Prudence had heard the whole story of Christian's adventure. She didn't seem off put by it, rather she wanted to help him keep it going. The red head smiled and gave him a curt nod. "You got it boss," she would save the task for later. When she was away from prying eyes and had access to her own system. Would make things a lot easier and hopefully not raise any red flags as she looked around for Blood's ship. No one would like that to happen, would point fingers at even more rebellion that was going on.

"Thanks, I'll be sure to give you a nice bonus for your troubles," Christian turned his head as one of GenEx's employees came in, pushing a cart of boxes. His mother's things. He requested them, hoping that it would help ease his mind.

He suffered plenty of physical damage at the hands of Erebos. His face was scarred, his ribs were still healing. It was the mental damage that he couldn't fight. The fear toxin did its damage. He gained a rather nasty amount of social anxiety and he had to take drugs just to make him able to go outside, even then he rarely left his office or home. Paranoia itched the back of his mind and he was constantly checking his back. Fearing that something or someone was going to hurt him. The worst part of it was the sleeping problems. He would be driven to nightmare night after night. Forcing himself to wake up screaming and covered in a cold sweat. He couldn't sleep, he didn't want to sleep. He was afraid of the monsters that lurked in the back of his head. Prudence even started to have the habit of sleeping over. Crashing on a couch in his room, only to end up with Christian falling asleep with his head in her lap. Getting at least a few hours of somewhat peaceful sleep. It still wasn't enough, but he had learned to deal with the bad sleep.

It was an attempt at trying to ease his mind, he wasn't sure if it would work or not. It wouldn't hurt to try, it had been a while since he had even thought about his mother anyways. Christian put one of the boxes on his desk and took a seat as he started to shuffle through it. His mother kept a lot things that Christian had done. Awards in school, pictures of concerts he was in, old friends and sleepovers. Even pictures when him, his mother, and father would take vacations. Go on long trips and see so many things. He did miss her. It did feel like sifting through these old memories was helping, even in the smallest way. Starting to put his mind at ease just a little bit.

It was strange to go through her stuff, she had kept a lot of things out of sight. Pictures of her and a man that Christian never met. He would of assumed it was her brother, but they were much too close to be that. It was probably an old love from before she met his father. He did stop however as he came across a picture of a young girl among all his mothers things. She had the same eyes as his mother and a few other common features. He couldn't have a sister, he would of known that. He was raised as a single child his entire life. The picture was still tucked away, hidden with several other things that it seemed she never wanted to be found.

A knock on his door, made Christian jump slightly. "Got some news for you Christian," Prudence said as she slipped into the office. She looked at the scattered things on the desk and gave Christian a smile. "Haven't seen anything of your mothers for a while, it helping you at all?"

Christian shrugged. "I don't know, I feel like I'm just always finding secrets that were hidden from me. But, its not important. What do you have to tell me?"

"I found Alister's ship. Its on Earth, while its like half away across the world at the moment. Its there, we saw the footage of Alister. Hard to say if he actually made it, but the ship is there. It made it off New Armstrong," Christian let out a breath of relief. It meant they made it out, hopefully everyone made it off and Alister had survived the whole ordeal. "We can contact them if you wish, from what you told me. It might put them at ease knowing you are safe."

"Yes, I am sure it would. Could also give them news on Daniella. They could try to rescue her. I would love to join them, but I am pretty sure I wouldn't be able to get away from the new goons. I need to be there or..." Christian looked at Prudence. "I hate to ask this of you Prue. I need someone on that ship in my place, so I can be kept in the loop. I need you to go in my place."

Prudence let out a chuckle. "You're kidding right? You can't possibly think that is a good idea. I mean..."

"Prudence please. It won't be for long, just until I can get on the ship myself. I need to just buy a bit more time with my father," Prudence groaned and ran a hand through her hair. "I owe you big time if you do this. I'll let you have time off, a lot of it. You can have the kid you've been talking about. I'll pay for your vacation and medical expenses, please Prue."

"Okay. Fine. I'll do it, but you have to explain this to the husband," she told him as she set HUD down on the desk. "Figured you would want to contact them. This is through my own alias, it won't be tracked back here. So go do your thing."

Prudence left the room to make sure no one would interrupt Christian for a little bit. Last thing he needed was someone coming in while he was trying to get in contact with wanted people. There was enough rumors about him going around as it was. Too many questioned if he could actually be a good leader for GenEx or if he would crash it to the ground.

Christian ran his hand through his hair as he got in contact with the Persephone. He needed to know who made it, what condition they were in, exact location so he could send Prudence their way. One of his hands tapped against the desk as if he were anxious. At least he could get updated on what their plans were and offer his help. It was just to wait for someone or the ship itself to answer.

There was a small musical tone as Christian'a call eventually went through to the Persephone . A not-so-familiar image with a sort of familiar face appeared in front of him, hands on her hips. She looked up at him and after each moment, recognition sinking in, smiled. "Mr. Bernet...it is a pleasure to see you again. And you're looking quite well after...events transpired. Your presence is very much missed aboard the ship. Captain Blood was very distraught over your forced departure. Setting aside pleasantries, you really should not be contacting us on this frequency...or any other. If the Dominion tracks your transmission...well, it would be quite dangerous. Most signals do not have access to our current location. Your transmission has come over the only frequency we've left open. I can give you a few moments, but no more, for your safety and ours. What can I do for you, Christian?"

It was the ship that answered, though might of made things easier to do it this way. "I survived, if that is what you mean. Don't worry about tracking...hard to track a traveling signal. Anyways a few is all I need. I want to know who survived New Armstrong, just to put myself at ease. In return I can update with news on Daniella. I am sure everyone would like that," Christian gaze went towards the door for a moment. He could hear Prudence greeting someone and telling them he was busy at the moment. Looking back at the screen, Christian offered a small reassuring smile to the AI. "So conditions. I am sure it takes more than losing an arm to take down Alister, yes?"

"We've had...quite a rough go of it since New Armstrong. The captain was deeply troubled at first, but he's back on his feet, thanks to Miss Roisin. The casualty list was short, but weighs heavy on us all. There were countless injured, including Alexei and Nova. It wasn't certain that either of them, or the Captain, was going to make it. And I'm sure that you've already seen the footage featuring Octavian and his performance. All factors considered, we are doing well. The ship has gone under extensive maintenance, we are all resting, and Alister is planning our next move. I'll pass along your concern. What do you know about Daniella? I know the entire crew is worried about her. I think the Captain may want to boldly rush to her rescue the moment he can...but we miss you both. He regrets breaking his promise every single day."

Christian was thankful that most made it out alive. Even if they had to face a long road of recovery. "That's good to hear. Glad people are at least alive," Christian cleared his throat. "Dani is back with Dr. McLaughlin, I am not sure where. Still trying to figure that point out, they are doing a good job of hiding it from me. What I assume is that it would be one of our old abandoned facilities. Too much of a risk to have Dani in a functioning one. Though, it would only look to be empty. A few have gone on my list. I just can't look into them without branding myself as more unstable as it already is," Christian bit down on his lip for a moment. Gathering his own thoughts. "I cannot personally join you all this time. Too much going on here, however I wish to have my secretary Prudence join the crew for the time being. She'll prove useful. She will have contact with me and I can fed you news of certain movements. She has ties to plenty of rich supporters in this new movement that has been started, you'll find makeshift allies that will help cover trails and offer any other support. Finally, she is a very talented hacker. Why I hired her in the first place. I can send her to your current location," Prudence was sure to figure out where they were with just a few more searches. "Just, do me a favor. Make sure Alister doesn't sleep with this one. She is married, but I doubt she would let onto his advances anyways. I'm getting off the point. Give my message to Alister, I am glad to hear they are all alive. I'll try to figure out exact location, Prue is working on that as well. But I will send her your way. If you don't mind the extra set of hands."

Persephone briefly ran a scan of several databases, pulling up all the information she could on one Doctor Gregory McLaughlin. What data was available was very impressive to say the least. Persephone, however, knew better. If this was the man associated with the experiments that gave Daniella her abilities, he was a dangerous man indeed. ”You shouldn’t extend your search any further than your own safety would permit. I know that both the Captain and Miss Pearson would prefer not to see your predicament become any worse. We will find her, I assure you.” Mention of Prudence prompted Persephone to run another search, and she nodded, slightly impressed. ”I’ll transmit you the coordinates with a specialized encryption. I do feel it is my duty to warn you that this ship is not exactly safe for her. I hope she knows this fully before agreeing to engage in such dangerous behavior. There are eyes everywhere...our location is quite secure, but it wouldn’t take much to bring the Dominion back on our trail. Send her along, and we’ll make sure she finds us. Also, I cannot make any promises on behalf of the Captain. If your secretary manages to stave off his advances, that is her prerogative. He is a bit more tame at the moment, so it shouldn’t be too much of a problem. If that is all, Mister Bernet, I think we should end this conversation. Every second is another chance for the Dominion to either track us down, or discover your continued cooperation. Be safe, Christian. Perhaps we shall see you soon.” The image of Persephone flickered off the screen.

Christian leaned back in his seat as Persephone ended the message. At least he would get Prudence on board, offer his help in some small way. He wasn't sure how much he would be. His father had him far too busy with company matters and visiting mutiple therapists in vain attempts to turn his son's thinking around. It wasn't working, Christian was still going to aid things. It was time for a change anyways.

____present day

"So these pirates have manners right?" Prudence asked Christian through the communication device the two set up. Full connection between the two of them and unable to be tracked no thanks to Prudence's knowledge.

"You'll be fine with them, its everyone else you have to worry about. I am sure someone on board will help you learn to shoot a gun," Christian replied. The red headed secretary shook her head.

"I'll have you know after you ran off, I took it on myself to learn to defend myself. Guns are rather useful, I am a natural shot. So, I think I will be good. But I'm coming up to the scrapyard. I'll contact you later. Don't forget you have that lunch meeting with your father. You will be meeting with the head of T. I. T. A. N, have a good day sir. Do make sure you eat at lunch as well. You have therapy after that."

"Prue, you left me your friend to take your place. Focus on the task I gave you. Take care," Christian ended the transmission from his end.

Prudence soon came across the ship, she looked up at it and nodded. If it was what Christian wanted she would do her best in his place. She ran a hand through her hair let out a sigh. At least it would call for an interesting tale to tell her kids one day. The time she helped Uncle Christian run with pirates. That would make Christian soon like a bad a**. Prudence smirked to herself, pushing her nerves back. She would meet Daniella this way and make sure she was tied off with a pretty bow when Christian would finally get back with her.

Two women were sitting not far from the ship. Walking over to them Prudence offered a warm smile. "Right. Christian told me," she looked over at Nova first. Taking in the woman's scarred face for a moment. "You must me Nova and that would leave you to be...Alexei?" Prudence rubbed the back of her neck. "I'm Prudence, Prue for short. Christian has sent me in his place as he is too busy dealing with his dad at the moment. I was hoping to catch the Captain, but didn't want to just walk onto the ship and risk getting shot. That would leave us in a bad place. But anyway, hi."


ʟᴏᴄᴀᴛɪᴏɴ :: christian - the office | prue - j'kr's shop
ᴄᴏᴍᴘᴀɴɪᴏɴ :: christian - no one | prue - alexei and nova
ᴍᴏᴏᴅ :: christian - working | prue - a tad nervous

[Lysander the Poet]

ｌｏｃａｔｉｏｎ: Training Room, Persephone.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxｃｏｍｐａｎｙ: Octavian.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxｓｔａｔｕｓ: 80% - All wounds sutured and bandaged, equipped with Heartbreaker MK I. Emotionally stable, motivated.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxｍｕｓｉｃ:We Will Robot Rock You - Queen/Daft Punk Mash-Up

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Alister had finally been renewed. Sure, there were still cracks in the captain’s emotional state, as such trauma normally left. He managed to wear a tense smile most of the time, seeing the crew well relaxed, drinking a lot less, and overall back to normal. They’d all learned to bury the scars from New Armstrong in the last two months, and Alister’s resolve helped strengthen their own. Oddly enough, he also found himself worrying about Roisin. She had been gone for the longest stretch yet, and he had no idea where she had fled to. Deep down, he supposed he knew that she would come back eventually...she had invested too much in this to abandon them now. Or so he truly hoped. Their training sessions had been rough at first, the pair butting heads constantly. One or the other would seem to be on the verge of giving up on the whole thing, bouncing back with a few inspiring words. It was an unconventional sort of friendship seeming to form between the two most stubborn people on board. It was mostly snide remarks, insults, and threats...just lacking the malice. The rest of the crew was still horrified by the Skeleton Harvester, but it just made their captain look that much more courageous. The medical bay was a lot emptier too, now only filled with the sounds of SARA MK II floating around, keeping things well stocked and organized, and Ella seeing to various medical issues while Roisin was away. Another good thing to come of all the horror, was Ella coming out of her shell. She had always been one of the quieter ones amongst the crew. Her and Lissy were very much alike: young, bubbly, and the last people you’d expect on a ship full of savage pirates. She’d really come into her own in the aftermath of New Armstrong, tending to wounds, watching Roisin’s technique, and learning as much as she could. Lissy had become one hell of a shot, and her counterpart had mad suturing skills.

A small funeral service was still pending for those that were lost in the battle. Zacharais could be seen roaming the ship, his face more grim than before. Without the familiar droning on of his brother following him, he seemed to out of place. He had come to the Captain, once Alister had gotten his head out of his a**, asking to organize the event before they left Earth. Alister had of course agreed, and preparations were almost complete. When he wasn’t training to wield his new appendage, he had been trying to find a way to commemorate those they’d lost since this whole thing started. He spent hours trying to write a speech, each attempt seeming even worse than the last. Trying to say the right words, without reminding everyone of the pain that was still too close to their hearts...that was the challenge. Roderick was just another death that Alister felt weighing him down. He may have regained his will to fight, but he still saw all his failures reflected in the injured and those no longer with us.

Lissy had the easiest adjustment to their time on Earth. her brother, Richard, worked as Jk’r’s hired muscle, and the two had a touching reunion when the Persephone landed. Richard was a beast of a man, the exact contrast of tiny little Elisia. She had spent her time split between catching up with her brother, scouting the surrounding area and watching for threats, and spending time with Alexei, as she was still charged with watching over her, giving Rhia the occasional reprieve. Alister was briefly scrolling through her last few reports, nothing of note, except for some mysterious movement a few miles away from the mine. It was beyond the boundary they had decided was safe from the shop, so whether or not it was a threat hadn’t been confirmed. There was a small, melodic tone that rang through the air, before Persephone appeared, staring at the captain. She had been monitoring the upgrades and repairs to the ship, and got on famously with J’kr, who was quite loving to the old ship. And just as her exterior had been repaired and improved, she too had changed with it, taking on a sleeker, more modern approach to her self image. ”Sorry to interrupt you, Captain. In Roisin’s absence, I am to perform a few simple diagnostics on your cybernetics to ensure their continued successful operation.” Alister pulled his metallic appendage back from a particularly hard strike. He had stopped training with normal punching bags, and often did not want to resort to simulations. He preferred the solid feeling of his fist striking solid objects. He turned his attention to Persy, extending his arm. She ran her hands above and below, scanning the arm. She calculated all the data practically instantly. She nodded at the readings, and crossed her arms. "Everything checks out. I made some slight adjustments, but Roisin's work is on the cusp of perfection. Your training is paying off.” Alister flexed the cybernetic, the feeling just slightly off from the arm he had lost.

Roisin had insisted that the arm, and gauntlet partner, had an official name. The pair had agreed on ‘The Heartbreakers’, symbolizing the promise he made to tear Halloran’s beating heart from his chest. Officially, it was the Heartbreaker MK I, an extremely well constructed cybernetic that was miles ahead of Cyberteknik’s public offerings. Alister often stared at the construct in the mirror, a continuing reminder of how he could never fall, lest his crew fall with him. Among all the other things that currently occupied his mind, there was the issue of getting back into the action. It began with Halloran pinning a fake rebellion on him, and now Octavian had begun a real one. There was a call to arms, spanning the system. The war had gotten much more complicated. It wasn’t just Dominion against Olympians. And he knew that he wouldn’t be able to just sit on the sidelines anymore. Liam had always told him it would come to this one day...the war would get out of hand, and it would be there time to shine. Alister didn’t even want to give the poor b*****d a chance to be right, so he’d avoided him thoroughly. Liam had taken the events of New Armstrong as a sign, a call to arms. He was gathering the forces of the IAH together as best he could in a limited capacity. Using Alister’s actions as a bit of propaganda, he was receiving a few calls here and there from associates. They needed to make this a rebellion so big that the Dominion couldn’t merely squash it under their well-funded boot.

”Also...I have a message for you, Captain. Mister Bernet contacted the ship a short time ago. He was mostly interested in the crew’s status, and wanted to ensure that you knew he was alive and well. He also gave his own speculation on where Miss Pearson could be held currently by GenEx. Lastly, he sent his personal secretary to our current coordinates, believing that she would be of some use, and assist him in staying connected to events aboard the ship. Christian insists that you do not attempt to engage in sexual relations with her, as she is married and most likely not interested.” Alister grunted in response, going back to the rhythmic punching routine he had been using to channel is frustration these past few days. It was good to hear Christian was alive, even if he was basically a captive. Moreso than he ever was with the Persephone, anway. He did not enjoy the idea of another civilian on board his ship. Another mouth to feed, another person to protect, and another possible casualty. He would have preferred to send her back from whence she came. Alas, it was too late for that, and it just earned a few more punches for the punching bag. It was at about this time that Octavian entered the room. He spoke to the ex-Dominion soldier between punches, still not quite sure about how he felt after the entire igniting a rebellion thing. A man whose loyalties were shaken so harshly...couldn’t be trusted to the fullest. ”It’ll get the job done,” He replied in reference to the arm. ”It’s about time I stopped throwing a little b***h fit and got back on my feet. I need to be planning a war, and a rescue mission, not wallowing. I suppose you partially have you to thank for keeping my head on my shoulders...even if I still lost the arm.”

Alister gave Octavian a smirk, the marking first legitimate interaction between the two as human beings. Octavian spoke positively on the crew, and of Alister. The pirate was quite taken aback, but would not show it. ”Oh, don’t you know? It’s all just a show for you. When you’re not around, we’re doing blood sacrifices, raping and pillaging, doing a bit o’ that cannibalism. We’re most certainly horrifying degenerates, and the stuff of nightmares!” A particularly hard strike almost tore the punching bag in half. ”Honestly, did you expect something like that? Something more frightening than just a group of people trying to live their life in the only way that’s open to them?” The question was not asked with malice. It was obvious that Alister was just messing with Octavian. His expression turned to a sad one as the man described the fate of his own crew. ”I’m sure they’re going to be alright, lad. Just have to hope they pick the right side in this war you’ve started.” The conversation began to tread into delicate territory, to the initial agreement between the two. Alister’s ultimatum had been simple, and by its terms, Octavian and Jin belonged in a cell. Not that Alister was going to throw them back into one. ”You effectively saved my life. Jin saved everyone by getting this ship up and moving. As far as I’m concerned...this family is now your family. You are rightly a pirate now, Octavian White. That cabin, you earned. I have no plans to put you back in a cell...but that means you’re part of my crew now. And that means fighting more of your Dominion friends...any of them that decide Halloran’s side is the right one, whether out of their warped loyalty, or fear of his wrath.” The Captain watched Octavian closely, the bloodstained cloth in his hands. He remembered the way Octavian’s blood scorched his skin upon contact. ”If you have anything you need to tell me...any reason you might be a liability...you ought to tell me now.”



━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

[Kagome SB]

ᴏᴄᴛᴀᴠɪᴀɴ ｗｈｉｔｅxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
ⓤⓝⓘⓣⓨxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
TRAITOR ←xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

〈xAND IS THIS SUPPOSED TO MATCH
the darkness that you felt???
I never meant for you to FIX YOURSELFx〉
✕ ✕xxxxxxx
〈x some legends are told
some turn to DUST or to GOLD
BUT YOU WILL REMEMBER ME,
remember me for CENTURIESx〉






When Alister gave Octavian the smirk, he honestly didn’t know how to feel about it. After all, this man was someone just a few days prior he was trying to arrest. And the words that came out of his mouth as Octavian spoke of his crew…they had an air of sarcasm, but behind it all, the former Fleet Captain sensed a sting. The past two months, Octavian had seen and heard stories. Why all of these people were pirates, why they chose to stand up when authority, or life, failed them. Octavian could have been one of these men and women, back then, when he found out about his disease. He was certainly one of them now, but not by choice—by duty. When being informally told that the pirates were his family now, Octavian frowned. He had grown to like many of the people onboard, and certainly they did not deserve the horrors of New Armstrong. But despite it all, he still felt detached. And when Alister spoke about being one of the crew, ‘his’ crew, that rubbed Octavian the wrong way.

“Pardon me, Mister Blood,” Octavian replied, wiping his lips free of blood and taking a moment to gather his lost breath, “But I would not consider myself a part of your crew. While I have stayed on your ship, it was out of necessity and duty. Plus, people had started sending your ship messages for me before I even was fully healed.” He paused, trying to figure out a way to word his thoughts without causing any anger from Alister. Though, that seemed difficult to do. “At the very least, I am not one of your men you can order around, without my consent to be ordered by you. For I—was—a Fleet Captain. And I still consider myself to be in charge of my own actions.” He stood up and paced the room as Alister trained, watching him carefully. “You are an admirable leader, to come back from a loss like that. I felt the same as you did several times in my life. But…perhaps what I asked you came out incorrectly. I asked you permission to stay onboard. I did not ask to join your crew. Several of your passengers were not your crewmen, I know that for a fact. And while I value your opinions, especially after seeing your capabilities as a leader, it does not mean…” Octavian paused. He was sounding like a businessman, a negotiator. Like his time in Unity conference calls. “…I cannot follow your orders. I do not want to overextend my welcome on this ship. But I will not join your crew, and be one of your men. I would be happy to partner with you, and I have the credits to do so, but I cannot raise your colors.” He took a moment to gather his thoughts. “I have my own men to lead. I am aware of my actions, believe me. For the past two months, I have been coordinating efforts to—” A sharp pain ripped through his stomach and Octavian doubled over in pain, letting out a long groan. He leaned against the wall, feeling the cough shaking his body and as much as he tried to force it down, he couldn’t. “D-Dammit,” he growled with a rare swear, holding himself tightly as he shook heavily, his cough spattering blood onto his arm and handkerchief. It was a small attack, and his breath vanished, taking him a moment to get it back as he gasped.

“…Do not call those men my friends. They are an embarrassment to the Dominion. Halloran is an embarrassment to humanity.” Octavian added as his attack subsided. The word ‘liability’ pierced Octavian’s ear. He frowned, anger crossing his face. Too many times had he heard that word used about him. “I am not a liability,” he snapped, before catching himself. “…You were not calling me that. I apologize.” For some reason in the past year, certain words just became triggers to him, making him angrier than he expected to ever get. “...I…” his stomach tightened as he looked at Alister. “…I assumed Miss Pearson had told you. But if we are to have any trust in this relationship, I suppose I must tell you…that I am…well, I am dying.” It was hard to say, especially to a man he didn’t know very well. It just seemed so personal, and it cemented his fate even further. “I have some sort of mutated blood parasite, manufactured by GenEx, in my system, and it is incurable and very fatal. What month is it—April? I am fairly certain I will be dead by October.” Speaking those words out loud made his blood feel even stranger within his own skin. And a bit of anxiety took him—how was he supposed to lead a rebellion when he would fall apart in a few months?

His comm rang. A missed call from Sonia, of all people. He ignored it and folded his bloody handkerchief so none of it stained his shirt, and he tucked it away for later.


۞ ۞ ۞ ۞ ۞


WITH: Alister || LOCATION: the Persephone || HEALTH: 80% - coughing up blood, shortness of breath || MISSION/OBJECTIVE: to get a better handle on his rebellion || OOC: ---

[The Smut Peddler]

Horizon Chapter V
Broken Promises

As Nova continued to daydream she almost hadn't noticed the young raven haired woman who sat beside her. Finally she would turn to her and return a weak smile back. She felt bad that Alexei had suffered such horrible blows on New Armstrong, but such was the life they had chosen, and Nova knew that. Though she had gone mute Alexei did not need words to communicate what she was asking the pink haired woman. Nova nodded as she reached her hand up and gently touched the thick taupe leather eye patch, the feeling of the embroidery greatly noted by her fingertips.

"Why didn't I get a cybernetic? Huh, suppose I wasn't half sure if it wouldn't just grow back." She said, chuckling before pausing and realizing this made no sense to anyone but herself. She lifted her hand and shook her head as she continued. "Sorry, never mind that. Wouldn't make any more sense even if I did explain, trust me."

She smirked as she folded her arms back behind her head and stared out at the endless catacombs before them.

"To be honest it was always told to me that the difference between pirates and soldiers was that soldiers wore medals to show their accomplishments, while pirates wore theirs as the scars upon their flesh." She smiled as she lined the scar that was covered by the large eye patch. "But this will be no such thing. This, is a reminder of what promises I've broken, what I've done, and failed to accomplish. I don't really need an artificial eye to try and cover that up. This is sort of my first attempt at redemption, in my own way..."

After a short time Nova turned to see a red headed woman stroll up to them knowing their names. Nova was both on alert and baffled by her knowledge of them, at least until she explained that she worked for Christian. It seemed that Christian's reach still wasn't very limited with the power of cash. But that came as no surprise to Nova. She sat upright and stood by the entry way to the ship. Where as before she would have acknowledged the newcomer with a bit more warmth, Nova seemed much more frigid than before.

"I suppose I shouldn't be surprised Christian sent someone out here. On the flip side, I hope he is doing well. If you're looking to speak with our captain please, follow me." While Nova didn't detect a threat, this person was still a stranger, and in a world like this it was always better to be safe than sorry. She'd happily bring the woman to Alister, deep inside the ship where there were plenty of crewmen to keep a careful watch on her, and better assess her intentions. She would nod to Alexei, unsure whether she wanted to accompany them or not as she brought the woman to Alister. Nova herself was curious as to what all this woman knew and hoped that she would have good news about Christian's status. The last thing she remembered he was in terrible shape. Nova paused as she neared the corner to the training room. She peered in to see Alister along with Octavian having a conversation. She stood beside the opening and knocked on the door frame.

"My utmost apologies for interrupting you Captain Blood, but I think this may be considered of high importance. It appears that Christian has sent an informant to you. She is requesting an audience with you. I would have waited had this been any other request, but this seemed as something you would want knowledge of ASAP." Nova nodded to him and to Octavian with the emotionless gaze that adorned her face these days. She turned to look back through the hallway with a curt and faux smile as she stood aside to allow access to the room. If there was anywhere in the place that left a potential intruder no means of escape it was being bottle-necked in the training room.

Without warning she felt herself pulled by her ear and moved out of the doorway as she turned further to look around her blind spot as she saw her brother with a less than satisfying look on his face.

"Just a reminder, anything that this group does is your responsibility while you're all here. If my men find so much as a patrol cruiser poking around the interstate, so help me the whole thing is off. I don't need any 'random' mine inspections either. You all can do whatever you want, you've full reign here, but if you guys want to take yourselves down by working with Dominion case workers and the like, just leave this place out of it. You gypsies may wander where you will and leave ruin in your wake, but me, I have something here and no intentions of seeing it fall down the mine shaft. So I suggest you keep a short leash on anything you wouldn't trust to watch you sleep." J'kr removed his hand, Nova rubbing her ear as she scowled at him. While this was very normal for the two siblings to fight they typically were not so vicious of words. Nova turned her attention to the large man off a ways down the hallway, but still in earshot of the two. Richard chuckled as he shook his head, putting his hand in his pocket before making his way past the two to exit the ship. "Sorry Commander, but I'm not getting between you two in a family feud. That's for damn sure."

Nova turned to look back at J'kr, who currently was wearing a very exaggerated pout on his face as he glared back at her. She would smirk, sometimes forgetting that they not that long ago were allowed to be so childish. How the world had changed them both it seemed. Demanding of them to sacrifice the spark of innocence to survive past the bloodshed and the tyranny that painted their lives such a vibrant scarlet hue. Nova nodded in agreement to her brother in silence before speaking.

"You have my word, J'kr. I will take responsibility for our stay. This man has spared my life, more than once. I owe it to him and his crew to lay down my trust and offer what I can to help in their cause." Nova spoke, her eye closed as she held her hand to her chest and nodded to him.

J'kr's demeanor changed back to the laid back one that had been seen prior as he smiled and nodded in return. "Alright, alright, enough with the formalities. A simple yes would have suffice. Fine, just keep an open eye on things around here. I don't want none of those damned GenEx cretins popping up in my shop that I keep hearing about. And speaking of rumors, tell that little man-eater I keep hearing about that if she wants, I got a job for her, and all the snitch juice she wants..."

He would chuckle as he headed off the ship to work on another project out on the external wall. The young man continued to ramble despite no one else being around as he twirled a large yellow wrench around in his hand like a baton. Nova on the other hand continued to stay close by the training room, to ensure the captain, the crew, and the entire mine's safety until she could confirm this woman as an ally.

xxxx┇ ✦ Mine // Ship
xxxx┇ ♢ 85%
xxxx┇ ✦ Emotionally withdrawn
xxxx┇ ✦ Abandoned