[nano] Corsair
Nov. 13th, 2009 07:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittydesadeShe was back in bed by dawn, but it was only half an hour later when the alarms woke her. Not her alarm for waking, either. Ship alarms. Harsh and blaring and sending wave after wave of adrenaline pulsing through her body.
"Unauthorized access," the computer shrieked. Of course it didn't shriek, it was a computer, the voice calm and even at all times, but it sounded panicked to her. "Unauthorized access. All security personnel report to the umbilicus hanger immediately. Unauthorized access."
"Shut up," Valerie muttered. "Shut up and give me a status report."
The alarm didn't go off, but the computer by her bedside brought up a display on the holographic background. It wasn't as bad as she had thought. It wasn't as good as she had hoped, either.
The Inglorious Bastard was still coasting next to them, also under attack by invading forces. The ship, whatever it was, had been modified to protrude at least four umbilicus passages, twice as many as the average ship that size. Multiple passages, multiple boarding teams. She could only imagine how crowded everyone on board must be.
Less crowded, now that some of them were on her ship.
The readout didn't register who was a friend and who was an enemy. Military ships often did; members of the military were chipped according to their affiliation for all but the Hourric, which meant that any display that read subcutaneous chipping could tell who was friend to the reading computer and who was enemy. All she got were life signs. A cluster of them around the umbilicus docking area, more streaming towards it. Too many to keep track of individually, which was a blessing in its own way, unless they were all invaders. It meant that not many of her people had died yet.
Valerie threw on her pistol, wrapping the belt around her nightshirt, and grabbed her knife. That was as much clothing as she would allow herself right now; her nightshirt was at least long enough to preserve dignity. Outside in the corridors, there wasn't much activity on her level. Everyone who could fight, whose job it was to preserve the security of the ship had already run to the scene.
"Captain?"
Burgess. Noriko Burgess, one of her security officers. She hesitated.
"Captain, get to the bridge." Valerie opened her mouth to protest. "No, Captain, get to the bridge. You can coordinate from there. If you…"
Neither of them got a chance to finish that sentence. Two stormtroopers rounded the corner and took aim.
Valerie had fired before she had realized she was aiming at a person, turned and sighted down the barrel and pulled the trigger. The man's chest exploded in a burst of red. A small burst, but a blossom nonetheless. Noriko was more brutal: three shots popped from her weapon and both men went down.
She glanced over at the other woman. "They shouldn't have gotten this far."
"I know." Noriko looked upset. She pushed her hair out of her face and back into its clasp again. "I know. They shouldn't have gotten into quarters at all, I don't …"
"Get down!"
They both dropped to the floor as a body came hurtling up the corridor between them, and a flash-bang went off. On her side or theirs, she couldn't tell. It hurt her ears and blinded her and the next thing she knew there was a hand gripping her arm and half pulling her upright, pushing her along the corridor.
"Burgess!" she shouted.
"Burgess is back in the corridor, Captain. You belong on the bridge."
The voice and the face were distorted, then coalesced into Eliot. Her eyebrows shot up. He was not the person she'd expected to be running through the halls of the ship setting off flash-bangs. Or wielding a pistol; on the other hand, she made sure all her people were skilled at least in the most basic of self defense tactics. Hand to hand, knife combat, and shooting. She hadn't expected them to need such skills on board the ship, though.
"You might also want to put some clothes on."
"We're repelling invaders, Eliot. Clothes are not my top priority right now." Although the recycled air was getting pretty cold on her bare legs. "What's our status?"
"We're holding. I don't know who's been put down and who's still fighting, but we're holding. They haven't gotten very far into the ship, with a few notable exceptions. Your quarters, of course…"
"Of course," she murmured. The Captain would, at least in theory, be privy to any sensitive information the ship was carrying. Which painted a big fat target sign on her back for capture. Not death, capture. Which was one small benefit at least. "And the rest?"
"Only one other: guest quarters."
Valerie frowned. Guest quarters made no sense, unless they thought there was someone valuable there. "But they would have to know that there's…" No. No, they wouldn't; they could see Ran's ship from the outside. They had no way of knowing who the ship belonged to, but any courier ship towing someone's personal vessel might mean that there was someone important on board. Someone whose wealth entitled them to a personal ship and importance entitled them to the benefit of a courier service, or a high class bodyguard masquerading as a courier ship.
That didn't even have to be the logic behind their thinking, but it was one explanation. Valerie's heart sank. "Do they know who they're looking for?"
"They seem to. They went straight for the Mentalist."
"What?"
He didn't answer. She still heard, echoing in from upper and lower levels, the rapid thump of boots on the carpeted floors or the occasional shout. It felt wrong to be standing here while he ducked into her quarters and got her clothes. She was on the verge of moving off, away, over to the combat zone when he emerged again. "We've repelled most of the invaders. Here." Pants, and a more reasonable shirt. She changed in the hallway.
"They knew where the guy was?"
Eliot's jaw was clenched, the only sign that she could find that any of this bothered him. "They seem to have. If they didn't, they knew where the guest quarters were and how to find which ones were occupied, which would give them an even chance of who to grab."
"And either way, maybe…" Maybe they knew something she didn't about what Ran was up to. Maybe they figured they had a chance of profit either way.
Maybe they were just after ransom.
"I want prisoners, if we can manage it," Valerie growled, stalking barefoot along the corridor and up to the bridge. "I want prisoners, the guest quarters can be converted into cells if we have to. Tamara from Maintenance can see to that."
"Captain, we do not have any interrogators or investigators on this ship…"
"Yes," she grated out, so angry she almost stormed right past the bridge on her way to it. "Yes, we do."
Sensors was able to bring up the security footage from inside the ship. She expected to see fires, somehow. Scorch marks, deep gouges, something to show what had happened in her ship. There wasn't much. The reality of invasive ship combat was that the walls were thick, the bullets designed to fragment in them so that they wouldn't penetrate to the outer hull and leave holes that would have to be found and patched. There was, ideally, nothing on the ship that would catch fire. Lasers had been eschewed from direct combat ever since it was practically discovered that there was no way to dodge laser fire. When you saw the shooter aiming the laser rifle at you, that was the last thing you saw, if they were a good shot. If they weren't you had a searing hole in you a second later. No lasers.
No bodies in the hallway, either. Blood stains here and there on the carpet, dripping down the walls, but no bodies. Everyone had been taken to the infirmary or to the small quarantine facility next door. If there was overflow they were in the guest rooms, most likely.
There were also some faces missing. "What happened." Valerie knew her voice was hoarse, didn't care, but cleared her throat anyway. No signs of weakness. No sign of fear. "What happened?" she repeated. "We're missing people. Who are we missing?"
Cowan, her evening communications officer, was still on shift. She wondered if that was because his relief hadn't turned up or because someone was dead or in the infirmary.
"Branson, Takashi, and Crow haven't reported in. Kedrick, Lao, Vicente, Ellis, and Dells are in the infirmary, I don't…"
He stopped. His expression, already distracted, turned to something very much like terror. His face paled, he blanched right down to his hands.
"Captain. I think you… I don't know if you're going to want to see this."
"Show me."
He pulled up the footage – no, it was a live feed, she realized – on the screen in front of her. Around her, everyone faded away as they tried to concentrate on the tasks at hand, which were formidable enough, and not eavesdrop. A moment later she realized she was grateful for that. This was the security footage from the other ship, from the cargo bay where they had taken prisoners. Takashi and Crow, from her ship, three others from the Inglorious Bastard, they must have been…
… and Ran.
Her hands were cold. She rubbed them one against the other to warm them. There was no sound. Why was there no sound? Cowan pressed the earpiece into her hand, and she put it on.
"… no ransom demands. We're not that kind of ship."
What kind of ship were they, then?
"You didn't need to take prisoners," Ran pointed out, while Valerie whispered shut up. Just shut up, you idiot from many, many meters away. "You're hoping to trade us for something on the ship. That's the only reason you would take crew rather than look for hostages or valuables in the cargo."
Some of his fellow prisoners seemed to wish he would shut up, too. Valerie wondered if he was saying all this for her benefit. It certainly wasn't for his, or for his captors. Presumably they knew why they'd taken him and the others. Shut up, Ran. Just shut up and we'll bargain and get you out of there.
"If we wanted something on the ship, we could have just taken it." The other captain spoke in a reasonable tone of voice, or at least, she thought he was the captain. Some sort of decision-maker on the ship, someone who had the attitude of being in charge of something and not worrying about what one prisoner thought of him. "We don't want anything on your ship."
"He's smarter than you are," Valerie muttered. "Don't do that."
Ran looked up at the man and smiled one of his glittery-eyed manic smiles. The kind she'd seen on his face before he did something like steal a fellow student's personal go-fast ship or ream out the Captain of the vessel he was working on. Something unwise but very much deserved.
"Don't do it," she pleaded with the screen.
"You want something on the ship. You want something on her ship, because that's the first one you attacked. It didn't occur to you until after you saw the other ship so close that it might be there. You were directed, you went straight for the guest quarters, but I didn't tell anyone what I was doing or where I was. There was no way for anyone to know where I was, so I'm betting you were after the messenger."
Messenger? Not Mentalist? Did they know the Tommy was on board? Or was he making sure that even if they didn't know, they didn't find out from him?
"You have no idea what we know, what we were after. You aren't as clever as you think you are, Tamerlane."
They knew his name. They knew his name? How did…
"She won't give it up, you know. She's even more stubborn than I am, and that's saying something. She'll never give up her cargo, not for you, not for any scum-sucking back-burned lowlife in the…"
The pistol butt came down square on his head. He reeled sideways, almost fell over, but managed to stay upright on his knees. Valerie clenched at the console.
"Well, if she's as stubborn as you say, then there's no point in keeping any of you alive." The captain smiled, his composure regained as quickly as that. He had never lost it, she realized. This was a show. This was all a show.
For whom?
Ran was smiling. Why was he smiling? He had a plan, he had to have a plan. Some way of getting out of this. Some way of using that too-clever brain of his and that damn fool mouth to get out of this. He was buying time. They had to help him escape. They had to get the rest of them out of there. She didn't tear her eyes from the screen, but… "Get someone across the…"
"They detached the umbilicus." Eliot was there. Eliot was standing behind her. She hadn't heard him come up. "It came half loose when we pulled away and they let it drop."
The captain had said something. Something she hadn't heard. Ran was still smiling. "You'll never know, now."
Never know what?
They shot him in the face.
Eliot had sent her to bed after the paperwork was filed and everyone was accounted for. Three letters to write. Two letters to families. One to a faceless corporation that wouldn't care if their operative died choking on a fish sandwich or repelling an attack. Not that she was bitter or anything.
Valerie didn't know how he expected her to sleep. She was full of energy, full of righteous fury that made her feel she could strike down the whole damn ship even if she knew, even if she was thinking about it and thinking practically. There was no way to catch them now. Even if she had the engine speed to match them on the initial thrust she didn't know their vector. They were gone. They were so much dust in the wind, because she had been more concerned with…
… with her people. With her living people, the ones who had survived. She had been more concerned with getting the umbilicus properly detached and making sure everything was secure for the initial jump and after that, when she had looked up again, the attacking ship was gone.
Ran's body with it.
They found him a few hours later. There was nothing left of his face.
She didn't want to see that. But now she was seeing it over and over again in her mind, even if she'd never laid eyes on him. His body. It was just a body now. There was nothing left of her friend.
Valerie pushed her hair back from her face, long dark hair, softened by cosmetics. He'd been the one, after years and years of primary and secondary school girls had failed to convince her, he had been the one to convince her that a little makeup would do wonders. Playing with her hair. Combing his fingers through it and arranging her like some sort of prima donna, lifting her head, painting her face, and then pulling a mirror around and now, look. Doesn't she look beautiful?
She looked at herself in the mirror now. Dusky skin gone blotchy with tears she'd forgotten about, lips dark and darker red from biting them. Beautiful brown eyes rimmed with red. Bloodshot. Hair all frizzy and limp where it wasn't frizzy. Not at all like the beautiful creature he'd arranged her into and then taken pictures. For no reason. Because he could.
Because it made him laugh. Because it was something that he had enjoyed, something he had wanted to do, and laughed, and chased her around the hall with the camera.
"You bastard. You stupid, stupid bastard."
Glass was so much more satisfying, but the thing, the stylus pad, she didn't even know what she'd thrown against the wall but it bounced and clattered at her feet. He'd fallen at the bastard's feet and lay still and there was nothing she could do about it. She was all the way over here, on the other ship. There was nothing she could do.
Years of academy training, shared experience, space and time and there was nothing she could do and she had to watch him die.
At least it had been quick?
The palm of her hand scrubbed at her face, violent gestures that made her eyes and cheekbones ache. That was a coward's excuse. It had been quick. It had probably been a couple of seconds of pain and maybe terror if he had been smart enough to know he should be afraid and then it was over.
She sat down on the edge of the bed and tried to push her hair back but her head came forward instead, tears pouring down and the harder she tried to stop them, the harder they flowed. All kinds of unwelcome thoughts crowding her mind. Memories. That look with his lower lip caught in his teeth when he was laughing at being caught out at something. The smile, deadly smile, when he was really pissed off but he didn't care for you to know it so he smiled instead. How he could be warm even when he wasn't, somehow, wasn't close, but he could be warm. He could be sweet. Now he couldn't be anything anymore and the suddenness of the absence of him, the constant repetition in her mind that this was it, there was no more, no more moments with her friend, they had had all they were ever going to get. It hurt. She wrapped her arms around her sides and gave up on trying not to cry, bent forward, perched on the edge of the bed, and simply tried not to want to die instead.
"Unauthorized access," the computer shrieked. Of course it didn't shriek, it was a computer, the voice calm and even at all times, but it sounded panicked to her. "Unauthorized access. All security personnel report to the umbilicus hanger immediately. Unauthorized access."
"Shut up," Valerie muttered. "Shut up and give me a status report."
The alarm didn't go off, but the computer by her bedside brought up a display on the holographic background. It wasn't as bad as she had thought. It wasn't as good as she had hoped, either.
The Inglorious Bastard was still coasting next to them, also under attack by invading forces. The ship, whatever it was, had been modified to protrude at least four umbilicus passages, twice as many as the average ship that size. Multiple passages, multiple boarding teams. She could only imagine how crowded everyone on board must be.
Less crowded, now that some of them were on her ship.
The readout didn't register who was a friend and who was an enemy. Military ships often did; members of the military were chipped according to their affiliation for all but the Hourric, which meant that any display that read subcutaneous chipping could tell who was friend to the reading computer and who was enemy. All she got were life signs. A cluster of them around the umbilicus docking area, more streaming towards it. Too many to keep track of individually, which was a blessing in its own way, unless they were all invaders. It meant that not many of her people had died yet.
Valerie threw on her pistol, wrapping the belt around her nightshirt, and grabbed her knife. That was as much clothing as she would allow herself right now; her nightshirt was at least long enough to preserve dignity. Outside in the corridors, there wasn't much activity on her level. Everyone who could fight, whose job it was to preserve the security of the ship had already run to the scene.
"Captain?"
Burgess. Noriko Burgess, one of her security officers. She hesitated.
"Captain, get to the bridge." Valerie opened her mouth to protest. "No, Captain, get to the bridge. You can coordinate from there. If you…"
Neither of them got a chance to finish that sentence. Two stormtroopers rounded the corner and took aim.
Valerie had fired before she had realized she was aiming at a person, turned and sighted down the barrel and pulled the trigger. The man's chest exploded in a burst of red. A small burst, but a blossom nonetheless. Noriko was more brutal: three shots popped from her weapon and both men went down.
She glanced over at the other woman. "They shouldn't have gotten this far."
"I know." Noriko looked upset. She pushed her hair out of her face and back into its clasp again. "I know. They shouldn't have gotten into quarters at all, I don't …"
"Get down!"
They both dropped to the floor as a body came hurtling up the corridor between them, and a flash-bang went off. On her side or theirs, she couldn't tell. It hurt her ears and blinded her and the next thing she knew there was a hand gripping her arm and half pulling her upright, pushing her along the corridor.
"Burgess!" she shouted.
"Burgess is back in the corridor, Captain. You belong on the bridge."
The voice and the face were distorted, then coalesced into Eliot. Her eyebrows shot up. He was not the person she'd expected to be running through the halls of the ship setting off flash-bangs. Or wielding a pistol; on the other hand, she made sure all her people were skilled at least in the most basic of self defense tactics. Hand to hand, knife combat, and shooting. She hadn't expected them to need such skills on board the ship, though.
"You might also want to put some clothes on."
"We're repelling invaders, Eliot. Clothes are not my top priority right now." Although the recycled air was getting pretty cold on her bare legs. "What's our status?"
"We're holding. I don't know who's been put down and who's still fighting, but we're holding. They haven't gotten very far into the ship, with a few notable exceptions. Your quarters, of course…"
"Of course," she murmured. The Captain would, at least in theory, be privy to any sensitive information the ship was carrying. Which painted a big fat target sign on her back for capture. Not death, capture. Which was one small benefit at least. "And the rest?"
"Only one other: guest quarters."
Valerie frowned. Guest quarters made no sense, unless they thought there was someone valuable there. "But they would have to know that there's…" No. No, they wouldn't; they could see Ran's ship from the outside. They had no way of knowing who the ship belonged to, but any courier ship towing someone's personal vessel might mean that there was someone important on board. Someone whose wealth entitled them to a personal ship and importance entitled them to the benefit of a courier service, or a high class bodyguard masquerading as a courier ship.
That didn't even have to be the logic behind their thinking, but it was one explanation. Valerie's heart sank. "Do they know who they're looking for?"
"They seem to. They went straight for the Mentalist."
"What?"
He didn't answer. She still heard, echoing in from upper and lower levels, the rapid thump of boots on the carpeted floors or the occasional shout. It felt wrong to be standing here while he ducked into her quarters and got her clothes. She was on the verge of moving off, away, over to the combat zone when he emerged again. "We've repelled most of the invaders. Here." Pants, and a more reasonable shirt. She changed in the hallway.
"They knew where the guy was?"
Eliot's jaw was clenched, the only sign that she could find that any of this bothered him. "They seem to have. If they didn't, they knew where the guest quarters were and how to find which ones were occupied, which would give them an even chance of who to grab."
"And either way, maybe…" Maybe they knew something she didn't about what Ran was up to. Maybe they figured they had a chance of profit either way.
Maybe they were just after ransom.
"I want prisoners, if we can manage it," Valerie growled, stalking barefoot along the corridor and up to the bridge. "I want prisoners, the guest quarters can be converted into cells if we have to. Tamara from Maintenance can see to that."
"Captain, we do not have any interrogators or investigators on this ship…"
"Yes," she grated out, so angry she almost stormed right past the bridge on her way to it. "Yes, we do."
Sensors was able to bring up the security footage from inside the ship. She expected to see fires, somehow. Scorch marks, deep gouges, something to show what had happened in her ship. There wasn't much. The reality of invasive ship combat was that the walls were thick, the bullets designed to fragment in them so that they wouldn't penetrate to the outer hull and leave holes that would have to be found and patched. There was, ideally, nothing on the ship that would catch fire. Lasers had been eschewed from direct combat ever since it was practically discovered that there was no way to dodge laser fire. When you saw the shooter aiming the laser rifle at you, that was the last thing you saw, if they were a good shot. If they weren't you had a searing hole in you a second later. No lasers.
No bodies in the hallway, either. Blood stains here and there on the carpet, dripping down the walls, but no bodies. Everyone had been taken to the infirmary or to the small quarantine facility next door. If there was overflow they were in the guest rooms, most likely.
There were also some faces missing. "What happened." Valerie knew her voice was hoarse, didn't care, but cleared her throat anyway. No signs of weakness. No sign of fear. "What happened?" she repeated. "We're missing people. Who are we missing?"
Cowan, her evening communications officer, was still on shift. She wondered if that was because his relief hadn't turned up or because someone was dead or in the infirmary.
"Branson, Takashi, and Crow haven't reported in. Kedrick, Lao, Vicente, Ellis, and Dells are in the infirmary, I don't…"
He stopped. His expression, already distracted, turned to something very much like terror. His face paled, he blanched right down to his hands.
"Captain. I think you… I don't know if you're going to want to see this."
"Show me."
He pulled up the footage – no, it was a live feed, she realized – on the screen in front of her. Around her, everyone faded away as they tried to concentrate on the tasks at hand, which were formidable enough, and not eavesdrop. A moment later she realized she was grateful for that. This was the security footage from the other ship, from the cargo bay where they had taken prisoners. Takashi and Crow, from her ship, three others from the Inglorious Bastard, they must have been…
… and Ran.
Her hands were cold. She rubbed them one against the other to warm them. There was no sound. Why was there no sound? Cowan pressed the earpiece into her hand, and she put it on.
"… no ransom demands. We're not that kind of ship."
What kind of ship were they, then?
"You didn't need to take prisoners," Ran pointed out, while Valerie whispered shut up. Just shut up, you idiot from many, many meters away. "You're hoping to trade us for something on the ship. That's the only reason you would take crew rather than look for hostages or valuables in the cargo."
Some of his fellow prisoners seemed to wish he would shut up, too. Valerie wondered if he was saying all this for her benefit. It certainly wasn't for his, or for his captors. Presumably they knew why they'd taken him and the others. Shut up, Ran. Just shut up and we'll bargain and get you out of there.
"If we wanted something on the ship, we could have just taken it." The other captain spoke in a reasonable tone of voice, or at least, she thought he was the captain. Some sort of decision-maker on the ship, someone who had the attitude of being in charge of something and not worrying about what one prisoner thought of him. "We don't want anything on your ship."
"He's smarter than you are," Valerie muttered. "Don't do that."
Ran looked up at the man and smiled one of his glittery-eyed manic smiles. The kind she'd seen on his face before he did something like steal a fellow student's personal go-fast ship or ream out the Captain of the vessel he was working on. Something unwise but very much deserved.
"Don't do it," she pleaded with the screen.
"You want something on the ship. You want something on her ship, because that's the first one you attacked. It didn't occur to you until after you saw the other ship so close that it might be there. You were directed, you went straight for the guest quarters, but I didn't tell anyone what I was doing or where I was. There was no way for anyone to know where I was, so I'm betting you were after the messenger."
Messenger? Not Mentalist? Did they know the Tommy was on board? Or was he making sure that even if they didn't know, they didn't find out from him?
"You have no idea what we know, what we were after. You aren't as clever as you think you are, Tamerlane."
They knew his name. They knew his name? How did…
"She won't give it up, you know. She's even more stubborn than I am, and that's saying something. She'll never give up her cargo, not for you, not for any scum-sucking back-burned lowlife in the…"
The pistol butt came down square on his head. He reeled sideways, almost fell over, but managed to stay upright on his knees. Valerie clenched at the console.
"Well, if she's as stubborn as you say, then there's no point in keeping any of you alive." The captain smiled, his composure regained as quickly as that. He had never lost it, she realized. This was a show. This was all a show.
For whom?
Ran was smiling. Why was he smiling? He had a plan, he had to have a plan. Some way of getting out of this. Some way of using that too-clever brain of his and that damn fool mouth to get out of this. He was buying time. They had to help him escape. They had to get the rest of them out of there. She didn't tear her eyes from the screen, but… "Get someone across the…"
"They detached the umbilicus." Eliot was there. Eliot was standing behind her. She hadn't heard him come up. "It came half loose when we pulled away and they let it drop."
The captain had said something. Something she hadn't heard. Ran was still smiling. "You'll never know, now."
Never know what?
They shot him in the face.
Eliot had sent her to bed after the paperwork was filed and everyone was accounted for. Three letters to write. Two letters to families. One to a faceless corporation that wouldn't care if their operative died choking on a fish sandwich or repelling an attack. Not that she was bitter or anything.
Valerie didn't know how he expected her to sleep. She was full of energy, full of righteous fury that made her feel she could strike down the whole damn ship even if she knew, even if she was thinking about it and thinking practically. There was no way to catch them now. Even if she had the engine speed to match them on the initial thrust she didn't know their vector. They were gone. They were so much dust in the wind, because she had been more concerned with…
… with her people. With her living people, the ones who had survived. She had been more concerned with getting the umbilicus properly detached and making sure everything was secure for the initial jump and after that, when she had looked up again, the attacking ship was gone.
Ran's body with it.
They found him a few hours later. There was nothing left of his face.
She didn't want to see that. But now she was seeing it over and over again in her mind, even if she'd never laid eyes on him. His body. It was just a body now. There was nothing left of her friend.
Valerie pushed her hair back from her face, long dark hair, softened by cosmetics. He'd been the one, after years and years of primary and secondary school girls had failed to convince her, he had been the one to convince her that a little makeup would do wonders. Playing with her hair. Combing his fingers through it and arranging her like some sort of prima donna, lifting her head, painting her face, and then pulling a mirror around and now, look. Doesn't she look beautiful?
She looked at herself in the mirror now. Dusky skin gone blotchy with tears she'd forgotten about, lips dark and darker red from biting them. Beautiful brown eyes rimmed with red. Bloodshot. Hair all frizzy and limp where it wasn't frizzy. Not at all like the beautiful creature he'd arranged her into and then taken pictures. For no reason. Because he could.
Because it made him laugh. Because it was something that he had enjoyed, something he had wanted to do, and laughed, and chased her around the hall with the camera.
"You bastard. You stupid, stupid bastard."
Glass was so much more satisfying, but the thing, the stylus pad, she didn't even know what she'd thrown against the wall but it bounced and clattered at her feet. He'd fallen at the bastard's feet and lay still and there was nothing she could do about it. She was all the way over here, on the other ship. There was nothing she could do.
Years of academy training, shared experience, space and time and there was nothing she could do and she had to watch him die.
At least it had been quick?
The palm of her hand scrubbed at her face, violent gestures that made her eyes and cheekbones ache. That was a coward's excuse. It had been quick. It had probably been a couple of seconds of pain and maybe terror if he had been smart enough to know he should be afraid and then it was over.
She sat down on the edge of the bed and tried to push her hair back but her head came forward instead, tears pouring down and the harder she tried to stop them, the harder they flowed. All kinds of unwelcome thoughts crowding her mind. Memories. That look with his lower lip caught in his teeth when he was laughing at being caught out at something. The smile, deadly smile, when he was really pissed off but he didn't care for you to know it so he smiled instead. How he could be warm even when he wasn't, somehow, wasn't close, but he could be warm. He could be sweet. Now he couldn't be anything anymore and the suddenness of the absence of him, the constant repetition in her mind that this was it, there was no more, no more moments with her friend, they had had all they were ever going to get. It hurt. She wrapped her arms around her sides and gave up on trying not to cry, bent forward, perched on the edge of the bed, and simply tried not to want to die instead.