Bargaining Stage
by AstroGirl
It was sheerest accident that led him to the cave on Gauda Prime. And if he had been himself, what he found there, he would have left alone. But he had been... Well, he had been tired, pushed far beyond the limits of exhaustion, and numb with that peculiar kind of numbness that comes only when the alternative is pain too great to be borne, as in the man who finds himself gazing in surprise at his own severed limb and feeling nothing. He had also, perhaps, been slightly mad. And so it was that his usual caution deserted him along with his once-cherished sense of self-preservation, vanished in some dim realization that his self had become something no longer worth preserving.
In that state, there seemed no reason not to open the lid. However ominous it seemed, this twisted alien sarcophagus, however menacing, however much it might make him think of previous near-disastrous encounters with the alien not-dead... however much these things might be true, still there was nothing it could do to him that was worse than what he had done to himself. He felt no need to stop and analyze what attracted him to it, felt no needs at all, save, perhaps, to distract his mind from the images that plagued him. Besides, "why not?" had always served him well as a reason when he had run out of reasons, and he was long out of reasons now.
And so he opened it, and she emerged, and blinked at him with ancient, sleep-filled eyes.
And still he felt only dim surprise, remembering that other undead female, who had come to him in the guise of... a friend... and attempted to enslave him. Make me die, he thought, and this time meant something quite different by it. There is nothing else you can make me do. Further back, he remembered images on a viewscreen: A dead planet. An old woman and a young one, ghosts (which he had never believed in) who, in need of some obscure sort of satisfaction from the living, had kidnapped... Had kidnapped...
No!
He wrenched his gaze away from the apparition. She was no longer important. Nothing was important, except that he continue breathing, because it was the only thing he knew how to do. And that he not think, which was not something he knew how to do, but perhaps he was learning. He would have to learn, if he did continue breathing, or he truly would go mad.
Banishing the woman -- the thing -- from his mind along with the unwanted memories, he turned to go from the cave, not caring that his pursuers might find him if he left this hidden shelter. Or maybe he did care, and that was why he went.
But it was then that she spoke to him.
"Kerr Avon."
And it was not just his name, those three mundane syllables that he had known all his life, but something deeper, something that reached into his walled-off heart and grasped at his essence. And he knew then that he had woken something strange and powerful, much more powerful than those pitiful ghosts of his past, and he wondered if he should be afraid.
He turned to face her, and found her regarding him, her alien eyes no longer touched with sleep but bright and dangerously perceptive. A dark radiance shone from the sarcophagus behind her, casting her marble face in shadows and making a glowing halo of her bone-white hair. She almost seemed an angelic figure, incongruously so. Surely, even if such things had existed, no angel in its right mind would ever dare set foot on a world like Gauda Prime.
She fixed him coolly with those otherworldly eyes, looking deeply into him. He felt her consciousness brush against his, lightly, as... someone else... had, in rare moments, been able to do. It had disturbed him then, and he found it in himself to feel a trace of resentment at it now. But those eyes held him easily, and he was unable to turn away.
To his surprise, he found some of the numbness gone, and, to his greater surprise the pain that lay beneath it did not kill him. Worse, his efforts not to think were all undone in something strangely approaching clear-headedness. It was her doing, he knew, and he felt an instant's desire to curse her for it, but held his tongue. He had always known how to hold his tongue, if not his fire.
"I am indebted to you," she said.
He simply stood, waiting for her to go on, anticipating nothing.
"I pay my debts," she said in a voice that sounded in his mind as strongly as in his ears. Impossible to lie in a voice like that. "You have earned a boon, a single gift. Ask."
Impossible to lie in that voice, perhaps, but deception was always possible. He quirked an eyebrow, waiting to hear the "but," the "if." It did not come. She merely kept him fixed with that same unnatural gaze.
"What do you want, Kerr Avon? Wealth? I can provide you with riches beyond even your imagining. Safety? A new face, a new name, a quiet life on a world where this Federation will never reach? It is easily done. Would you like to see the Federation toppled, crushed so utterly that it will never rise from the ashes? I can do that. Do you wish your enemies destroyed, paid back a hundredfold for the suffering they have caused you? It is nothing."
He remained unmoved.
"Or perhaps you would rather a different sort of gift." She smiled. "To have your own pain erased, your memories forgotten?" She paused, smiling faintly, her mind still resting lightly on his. "No, I can see that you do not want that. Or, rather, you do not want to want it. What, then?"
A wry expression crossed her face, as she answered his unspoken -- his barely conscious -- thought. "Ah. No, Kerr Avon. I am afraid that that is the one thing that is beyond me. The past is the past. There may have been a dozen points -- a hundred -- where you could have altered your own destiny, yes, but what you have done you have done, and the past is written in stone, the only truly unalterable thing in the universe. But there is nothing else that is beyond me.
"I can raise the dead, Kerr Avon."
His head snapped up.
"Ah, yes, that has your attention, doesn't it? There is a name on the front of your mind. Speak it."
He was silent.
"Speak it!"
Faintly: "Blake..."
"Blake."
He whispered it. "Blake."
"I can return him to you. Alive, and healthy, and whole... in body."
"And... will he remember?" For the first time, he had spoken above a whisper. There was a rasp in his voice that might have been hope, or despair, or just the result of a long, waterless flight through the woods.
"Remember? Of course he would remember. Would you have me take from him that which you are so afraid to part with? Besides, I have offered you one gift, Kerr Avon, and that would be two." An endless moment, then, until she looked him deep, deep in the eyes and said, "Well?"
He had only one word for her. In his mind, in his heart, where there should have been questions, rationality, suspicion, there was only the word, and when it emerged from his lips he did not even need to hear it.
"Yes," he said.
Time passed. He spent it practicing his new trick of not-thinking, and if he did not master it, exactly, he at least seemed to manage a vague, welcome sort of mental blankness, something akin to sleep, but safer. Eventually, her voice roused him, floating disembodied through the chamber, through his head. "It is done."
He rose and looked around him. The cavern he stood in was almost unrecognizable as the one in which he had sat down: all dim shadows, and no sign of her, and a deep, unfilled silence, like the echoing nothing inside his own head.
And, across from him, a slab. And on the slab, a figure.
He suddenly did not think that he could take the few steps necessary to cross the room, to look at what lay on that slab. But because he did not believe he could, and because there was still some perversity left in his soul, he did.
And, of course, it was him. It was -- Speak it! -- Blake. Blake, stretched out before him, naked, and breathing quietly in what was apparently a serene and natural sleep. That was almost obscene, somehow. Not that he was unclothed, but that he could sleep, here, his brow untroubled, in the same room with his... in the same room with him.
He reached out his hand, and did not touch Blake's skin. He did not lay his fingers on that unscarred cheek, did not trail them down that sleeping face, brush them lightly over the parted lips. He did not move his hands farther down, stroke the unmarked smoothness of the chest and belly, celebrate with tactile confirmation the body's integrity. He bestowed no kisses. He whispered no apologies. He did not lower his head to that shoulder and weep. He merely stood there, not-touching, one last unbridgeable millimeter trembling between them.
And, then, because he did not think he could, he withdrew his shaking hand back to his side, and he turned his back on the living body, and he left.
Or rather, he turned to leave, and did not. Oh, he would have done. Would have left because it was the only thing to do, to walk out of the cave and leave Blake to his life. A balance restored: a life given for a life taken away, and nothing more to be said or done between them. But he was slow, that force that had always attracted him to Blake operating even now, hindering his footsteps. Like a quark bound to a quark, the further he got from Blake the harder it was to keep on moving away. And so he had not yet reached the cave mouth when Blake awoke.
"Avon!"
The name cut through him like plasma fire. An accusation, a curse, everything that he deserved from Blake... He had not escaped it, then. Odd, this: he found he might almost welcome hatred from Blake, if it were not for the fact that Blake did not deserve to suffer it. Feeling the numbness rush in on him again, he turned... and saw that Blake's eyes were not on him. They were staring in sightless confusion at the cavern's ceiling, the stricken look in them exactly that of a man waking from a nightmare, one which is fighting to follow him upward into consciousness.
"Avon!" A wail, a plea, a summoning...? Something. He did not know what, only that it made him want to weep. He had not wept in thirty-four years, and he did not do so now, but it was only because he seemed to have forgotten how.
And then that attractive force between them had snapped him back again, and he was at Blake's side, gripping his hand, knowing he had no right to do so. He wanted to speak, to tighten that unearned handclasp and say "It's all right Blake. It will be all right." But, unable to tell such a catastrophic lie, he found himself left only with silence.
Suddenly those eyes locked onto his, and there was awareness in them, a clear horror, a horrible clarity. "Avon," he cried again, barely in a whisper now, but this time it was unmistakably an accusation. Avon tried to let go his hand, but found it impossible... though whose hand it was that refused the release he could not say. Brown eyes held his and asked him, wordlessly, Why?
I don't know! he wailed. And It was your fault! and Because that is what I do, Blake, and you never should have trusted me, not from the very beginning!
None of that being sayable, of course, he simply lowered his eyes.
At last, Blake's gaze gave up trying to engage Avon's, traveled instead down Blake's own body, to the place where three gaping, bloody wounds were visibly absent. He released Avon's hand, slid fingers down to probe at his own impossible intactness. His eyes, when they returned to Avon's face again, were startled and afraid. "What happened?"
You remember, said Avon with his stare.
And, clearly, he did. "You... I was... I was..."
Dead, Blake. You were dead. Distantly, some part of him wondered at the mechanics of it all. Was this Blake's corpse, reanimated, miraculously vanished from under the noses of astonished Federation troopers? Or was this a new Blake, freshly re-created? Did that scarred, blood-stained corpse still lie somewhere in the wreckage of Blake's rebellion, a lifeless object to be spat upon and gloated over? Did it matter? Perhaps it did, if pondering those questions would serve to keep him distracted from the questioning pain in those eyes.
"How is it," Blake said with great deliberateness, "that I am alive?"
Avon straightened. "You'll need clothes," he said.
"Avon, what happened?"
"And food and water. Transportation off-world. Though I'll understand if you... don't wish to share accommodations."
Blake had sat up, and now, suddenly, he was standing, gripping Avon's biceps, nearly shaking him. He seemed utterly unconcerned with his own nudity. "Avon! What happened to me?"
The hands, the voice, seemed distant. He saw only the cavern wall across from him, and that slightly out of focus. His own voice continued speaking. "There's a settlement not far from here, I think. I'll go and see what I can find."
Retreating from those clutching hands, and, less escapably, from the memory of those clutching hands, he fled the cave.
It was dusk when he emerged, the bloated moon of Gauda riding low on the eastern horizon. That surprised him slightly, bringing him to the realization that he had no idea how long it had been since he had last seen this planet's sky. Still, the oncoming darkness suited his mood and his purposes well enough.
He heard nothing in the woods and wondered if they had given up searching for him, but still he maintained his wary vigilance, a very different thing from the blind stumblings that had brought him to the cave. He felt more focused now, if only slightly less numb, infused at last with purpose. Clothing for Blake, and water, and food: these were concrete goals; these were things his mind could grasp. And stealth and thievery, these were abilities he possessed. (But he would not let the words "stealth" and "thievery" conjure up another image, a face in his mind. He would remain focused on survival and the task at hand. He would.)
When he came to the village, it was silent and empty.
He hovered in the woods, suspicious, alert, but there was no sound but the rustling of leaves in the wind. So he listened to the wind, and he considered. The settlement was small, perhaps a dozen houses, but when he had come this way last there had been a lively bustle that had warned him from a distance not to approach. Even at dusk, he thought, there should be activity: residents coming home from wherever they went (or, on this planet, perhaps, leaving home to engage in whatever dark activities might fill their nights). There should be voices drifting faintly through open windows. There should be children making the kinds of noises children make. There should, at least, be lights.
Eventually, he made a decision, the first one he could remember deliberately, consciously making since... Well. But, it being unlikely that this was a trap set up for him specifically, and more than likely that whatever had happened here was already over with, he abandoned his watchful position in the trees and made his way into the village.
No sound. No movement but his own careful footsteps. If this place was abandoned, he realized, it was just as well for him (always assuming they had left any supplies, of course). If anyone saw him, he would rationally do best to kill them, and he had no gun. (He would not remember the gun he had carried, how he had run with it through Blake's base, clubbing rebels and troopers aside in the churning confusion that followed what he had been sure would be the instant of his death. Would not remember how he had emerged from the base with it in his hands and suddenly found himself staring at it with something like horror, how he had dropped it with a cry and left it lying there on the carpet of leaves. Would not.)
In the first house, there were three people. A man, a woman, a child of perhaps ten Earth years. They were sitting at a table, half-eaten meals in front of them. Their eyes were closed. There were no marks on their bodies.
Avon sniffed. Gas? If so, all trace of it was gone, or else it was odorless. He had seen enough of death to know that these bodies were recent, hours dead, at the most. Time enough for gas to dissipate? Possibly. He monitored himself carefully for signs of poisoning: Sleepiness? Confusion? A sickness in the stomach? How could he tell?
When it became apparent that he was likely to continue breathing, he helped himself to the corpses' food supplies. Would Blake's reanimated cells, he wondered, be in need of nutrients, starving for energy? That possibility in mind, he sought out the most staple and efficient of foodstuffs. Fruit, grains, ration bars. Carbohydrates. Protein. Nothing they would need a fire to cook.
In the second house, he found four more corpses and a rucksack to carry the food in.
In the eighth, one of the dead was about Blake's size, and in the bedroom were suitable clothes, even a shirt with flowing sleeves, the kind Blake had favored on the Liberator. (A sudden image: Blake smiling, laughing at something forgotten, his ridiculous sleeve billowing outward as he raised an arm, clapped it around Avon's shoulder...)
In the final house, he found her.
She stood there, eyes closed, her fingers on a woman's lips, a look of transcendent pleasure on her alien face. The corpse breathed out with a rattling sound and closed its eyes.
She opened hers and smiled at him.
"You did not imagine, Kerr Avon, that such power would come for free?" There was amusement in her voice.
Part of him felt, as his eyes flickered from the woman's body to the alien's face, that this should make a difference. It didn't. The sentence in his mind was: Blake must not know. But what he said was, "Nothing is ever free."
And, knowing that, he returned to the cave.
"So. You came back."
"Don't I always?" he said, regretting it instantly.
Blake loomed over him, using his size to intimidate. A familiar tactic. It would have worked better if he hadn't been naked. "You're going to talk to me, Avon."
"Here. I brought you some clothes." He thrust the bundle at Blake's midsection, and Blake grasped it, as if by reflex. "I thought you might want to get dressed. Purely your choice, of course."
Blake looked down at the pile of clothing he now held, picking at it with his fingers. A strange expression crossed his face as he saw the sleeves. He looked at Avon a moment, and, suddenly, he was overwhelmingly Blake, the Blake he had known. Avon supposed he should not be surprised to find that that hurt. He looked into Blake's face for a moment, unable not to, and wished for the scar back.
Blake shrugged suddenly, turned, and put the clothing on. It fitted well, Avon noticed. At least one of them looked presentable. Unconsciously, his fingers trailed to the front of his own filthy leathers, tracing the outline of something that might have been a bloodstain. He realized it, and yanked his hand away as if the jacket had grown hot.
"There's food, as well," he said.
"I'm not hungry." Well, that answered one question, at least. Hell, if you're going to reanimate a corpse (or, for that matter, recreate one), it can hardly be much more of a challenge, can it, to see that it wakes up with a full stomach?
The reanimated corpse settled himself down -- on the sarcophagus lid, Avon noted. Strangely appropriate. "Sit down, Avon." This in that arrogant, commanding tone Avon had always claimed to hate. "Explain."
He did not want to have this conversation. Did not want it, no, but clearly it was going to happen sooner or later, and so it might as well be now. Why wait until the wound had started to heal to begin picking at the scab? He sat. "What would you like me to explain, Blake? Why it is that I shot you?" Well, now. The words were capable of passing his lips, after all.
Blake steepled fingertips in front of his lips, wearing his most serious of serious expressions. "You thought I'd betrayed you."
It could hardly be this simple. "Yes."
No, it was hardly simple; nothing remotely simple about that pained incomprehension in Blake's eyes. "How could you... Avon, how could you even think such a thing? I thought..." A hand wiped across the eyes, the newly-creased brow. "I thought you knew me better than that."
You. Anna. Me. Anyone is capable of betrayal, Blake. No one is ever what they seem. "Well, obviously you were wrong."
He watched Blake struggle for control, mildly disappointed to witness him grasping it. Easier if Blake had struck him and thrown him out of the cave. But when had his life ever been easy?
"So why am I alive?"
I wish to hell I knew. Of all the things I have been well rid of in my life, why it is that I chose to resurrect you... Damn. Blake was waiting for an answer. And he would have to say something... "I... There was something in this cave. An alien of some sort. Imprisoned, I think. I let it out." He shrugged, as if alien deities in caves were no strange thing to him. Perhaps he had simply lost his capacity to wonder at such things. "Apparently whatever it was, it was possessed of some extremely powerful abilities. It offered me... a favor."
Open astonishment on Blake's face now, incredulity in his voice. "And... I was the favor?"
He shrugged again. It seemed a usefully non-committal expression. "I realized that I had made a mistake, Blake. I... don't like making mistakes. Therefore, I took the opportunity to fix it." A part of himself stood apart and marveled at this. Amazing how quickly the old thought patterns, the old justifications resurfaced in response to Blake. He embraced them with a certain sense of relief.
Blake buried his head in his hands. An understandable reaction: it must surely be a traumatic thing, returning from the dead. He was finding it rather so, himself. Well, best for both of them, perhaps, to leave Blake to his own thoughts for the moment. He turned to busy himself with sorting through the food stores. Strange, he would have expected to welcome Blake's silence, not find it oppressive...
Eventually, a voice behind him: "I've got to get in contact with my people."
He turned. "I hate to be the bearer of bad news, Blake, but your 'people' are almost certainly all dead."
"You can't know that!" Ah, denial. A luxury he had never been able to afford. Nor could Blake afford it now.
"After I..." No, he could not say it twice. He started over. "Your base was overrun with Federation troops, Blake. There must have been a dozen of them in the tracking gallery alone." In truth, he had no idea how many there had been; his mind had registered the number only as "enough." "Some of your rabble came charging in to confront them -- that's how I managed to get away, in the confusion -- but, in my guess, they were probably the last. I don't know how many people you had, Blake, but judging by the number of bodies I saw on my way out" -- he remembered them dimly: the bodies, not the faces; every dead face staring at him had seemed to be Blake's face, and he had deliberately not looked at them -- "there could not have been very many left. And any survivors with an ounce of sense should be miles away by now and deep in hiding."
He watched Blake take that information and store it away somewhere. A very different Blake, this, from the man who had nearly abandoned all of them in a fit of self-pity after the death of a single follower. Avon felt he should approve, but that emotion wouldn't come, either.
"What about your people?" Softly.
He felt his own mouth twist. He had happened to catch a glimpse of that smile in a mirror once; it had both frightened and amused him. "Oh, I am quite certain that they are dead."
"Why? Did you kill them, too?"
For an instant, he was shocked into nothingness. And then, able to think again, he found himself wondering what expression there must be on his own face to put that look of horror on Blake's, to bring that warm, dark pity into Blake's eyes.
"I'm sorry," Blake said. And, dear god, he looked it.
Suddenly, it was all too much, all too utterly, utterly absurd. Hysterical laughter shook him, great, hoarse, heaving breaths of it.
If possible, Blake looked even more alarmed. "Avon! Avon!" Blake grabbed his shoulders, and that was amusing, too, Blake clinging to him, again... "Avon, what's wrong with you?"
"You're sorry!" he managed to gasp out, tears of laughter gathering in the corners of his eyes. "You're... sorry!"
He flinched as Blake pulled towards him, expecting... a slap? For his hysterics? (Another vague memory: Soolin. Two ways to calm the hysterical...)
But Blake simply pulled him close. A hug. How humiliating. In a moment, he was going to stop laughing, and then this would just be embarrassing. The thought made him laugh harder, pressed against Blake's shoulder, great gasps of air exploding into his lungs and shuddering forth like sobs.
But, of course, he couldn't go on like this, and so eventually he stopped. He stood there a moment, still leaning on Blake, his eyes closed.
Blake pulled back, gently, and Avon opened his eyes... because he would have to do that, eventually, as well.
"Avon?" Still gentle. Avon could have laughed at that, too. "Are you all right?"
A breath. Composure. He would not wipe at his eyes. "No, Blake. I am not all right. I do not believe that I have been all right since the moment I first set eyes on you." He meant it bitterly, an insult. Somehow it didn't quite sound that way.
Blake merely looked at him, contemplative, eyes holding Avon's. The old Blake eyes, crinkling slightly with something like the old Blake warmth, the old Blake humor.
"I missed you, too, Avon."
Avon reached out a fingertip, feather-tapped it against the nonexistent wounds in Blake's chest. "Oh, Blake." It came out barely a whisper, surprising him. He hadn't expected to say it at all. "I wish that I had missed."
Startlement on Blake's face: at the admission, or at the grimness of the joke? And then a smile, followed by laughter, deep and rich and almost healthy. Avon found himself smiling back. A real smile. He'd almost forgotten how it felt.
And, then, finally, he felt a wave of weariness overwhelm him, as if the effects of the last... however long it had been... were at last catching up to him, all at once. Suddenly all he wanted to do now was to curl up on the cavern floor and sleep. He didn't even care if there would be dreams.
"I'm tired, Blake. Will you stand a watch?" Blake looked entirely fresh. Well, no reason he shouldn't be. He'd been sleeping the sleep of the dead, after all. Not waiting for an answer, Avon began removing his jacket, bundling it up into a pillow. A stiff, smelly, dirty, metal-studded pillow, but better than nothing.
"There are still some questions I want to ask you."
He sighed. "I don't doubt it." He lowered himself to the floor, rested his head, hoping Blake would take the hint. No such luck.
"What happened to the Liberator? I heard... rumors."
"It was destroyed." Flatly.
"And Cally?"
"Dead." Dead. Dead. It was, after all, the only possible answer to any such question. Everyone was dead. Everyone he had cared anything at all about, everyone he might even remotely have considered calling "friend." Even this man who was standing here talking to him. But, no. Blake, at least, was alive, now. The one mistake in a lifetime of mistakes that he'd been able to undo. Although Blake would probably get himself killed again in some damn-fool heroic way soon enough. He felt an odd sense of panic rising slowly at that thought and desperately fought it down.
Blake was still speaking. "I'm sorry," he said.
"It's not your fault," he wanted to say, but his mind filled with the image of a bearded man on a medical table... No. Blame where it was due. Blake was not on Terminal. I was. And so, he said it after all. "It's not your fault, Blake."
Blake's face had softened. "I'm still sorry."
That word again. Avon had never believed in "sorry." "Sorry" was what people said to disassociate themselves from the consequences of their actions. "Sorry," was dishonest, an excuse, a lie.
And yet, somehow, now, coming from Blake... it helped.
He felt sleep drifting towards him. But Blake still would not leave him be. "Isn't there anything you want to ask me, Avon?"
No. No, he did not want to ask, particularly not now. But somehow he did need to know the answer, so... "After Star One... Why didn't you contact me?"
Blake's face changed. Regret? "I didn't think you'd want me to."
Avon felt his own face forming into a shadow of his favorite "are you an idiot?" look.
Blake did not smile in response. "At least... not at first. And then... Too much time had passed. I thought it would be better to let you come to me. I suppose... I suppose I wanted proof that you were there of your own free will."
Avon failed to suppress a bitter laugh at that. Well, he hadn't been trying very hard.
"Avon..." A pause. A strange interplay of expression over Blake's face, in the dimness of the cavern. A low, almost-whispering voice. "Do you hate me?"
Avon's eyes widened. Of all the things that Blake might have asked him, he had not expected this. Deliberately, he relaxed, settled back onto his "pillow," drew a breath. "I hate what you've done to me," he said.
Blake reached out, took his hand. Avon allowed it. Why not? "And what have I done to you?"
He laughed again, flickered his gaze over their pitiful pile of stolen possessions, around the cave: a hole in the ground on a hole of a planet. "Look around you, Blake."
Blake acknowledged that with a rueful smile. His thumb traced a delicate pattern on Avon's palm. Avon slept.
He awoke, in a moment of disorientation. Where...? Oh. Yes. He was in a cave, on Gauda Prime, with a man he had killed standing watch over his sleep.
Slowly, he opened his eyes. Yes, there was Blake, sitting propped up against the cave wall, turned slightly away from him, his face brooding. He'd obviously been thinking. Not good: Blake thinking was the only thing more dangerous than Blake not thinking.
Dim sunlight was filtering through the cave's opening, catching strange, mobile highlights in Blake's brown curls, painting the side of his face in a complex pattern of sunlight and shadow. Avon's eyes were transfixed, and he found himself thinking, in wonder, Blake.
Blake stirred slightly then, turned towards him, and the spell was broken. Catching sight of Avon's opened eyes, he smiled. "Sleep well? How do you feel?"
He felt... He felt as if he had slept. It was almost a novel sensation. When had he last had sleep, real sleep? Xenon?
"Well enough," he said, answering both questions. He sat up. "What about you? Do you need to get some sleep?" The idea of sitting in this cave for hours more while Blake rested was galling; he wanted to leave this place, to begin moving, planning, surviving. But an exhausted Blake would be a liability.
"No, I'm all right, for the moment." Blake's reply was distracted. Avon merely looked at him, waiting for him to speak whatever was on his mind.
"I saw your alien," he said at last.
A chill seized the nape of Avon's neck. "Did it speak to you?"
"No. No, but it -- she -- looked at me. I can't explain it, but I felt the... power... there." No need to explain, of course, even if it could be put into words. Avon wondered, briefly, what the creature had been doing back here. Checking up on her handiwork?
Blake gnawed abstractedly on a thumb, a habit Avon had always viewed with equal parts disgust and a strangely affectionate amusement. It did not amuse him now. "Avon... Did she offer you anything else?"
The sensation at the back of his neck was growing now, creeping its way across Avon's skin. "Nothing that tempted me," he said. And then, the old habit, defending with insult: "You don't imagine I would have chosen to resurrect you if I'd been given any more attractive options, do you?"
But Blake would not rise to it. A light was burning in his eyes, that too-familiar fanatic tone rising in his voice. "That kind of power, Avon. Think of it! If this being can resurrect the dead..."
No. No, Blake, no.
"I've lost a lot of good people, Avon. So have you. Cally. Vila..." That last on an almost-questioning note, as if Blake still held out hope. Avon shook his head, whether in denial or to dislodge the faces from his mind, he did not know.
"She won't do it, Blake." He grasped desperately at this logic. "She owed me a debt. She paid it. You won't get any more help out of her. She was quite clear about that."
"But she might be amenable to persuasion, Avon. Perhaps there is something we could do for her. Just imagine what kind of an ally a being with that kind of power would make!"
An ally. "Would you like to see the Federation toppled, crushed so utterly it will never rise from the ashes? I can do that." A silent village. A human woman's dying breath. An alien smile. How much power, to resurrect everyone they had ever lost? How much, to topple an empire? "You can wade in blood up to your armpits..." His stomach clenched. The image of Blake covered in blood was too immediate to be metaphorical.
"Don't dwell on it, Blake. It's impossible." He hoped.
"Nothing's impossible, Avon." A terrible, sunny smile. "You've just proved that."
Avon closed his eyes.
Blake paid him not the least attention. "She was right here," he said, moving over to stand by the sarcophagus. "Right before you woke up. She was here." He rubbed a hand over the lid, as if it were a fine, rare wood whose texture he desired to savor. Avon looked at it, for what seemed the first time. It was not wood. It was something dark, filthy, covered in twisted carvings whose shapes hurt the eye. Had he ever seen a light shining from this coffin, and thought it beautiful?
"Perhaps this is important to her," Blake went on, as if unaware of the darkness of what he touched. "Perhaps she needs to come back to it for some reason. She walked up to it, and then she just... vanished." He was looking down at the tomb lid speculatively now. "I wonder..."
"No, Blake!"
Blake looked up from where he had begun to work free the clasp on the lid. He looked innocently, idiotically unaware of any danger.
Panic welled up in Avon. Irrational, incoherent. What did he expect? That she would suck the life of out Blake, whom she had expended so much energy to resurrect? Unlikely. She probably wasn't even in there. But he did not want to see the inside of that tomb.
Blake, just as clearly, did. "But what if she's here, Avon? Don't you want to talk to her, to at least try? Certainly it can't hurt to ask!"
It can hurt if you get an answer. "Leave it, Blake!"
He looked puzzled. "Why are you so against this? Is there something you're not telling me, Avon?"
He turned his face away, disgust welling in him. Damn Blake. Damn him and his stubbornness, and his questions, and his damned, double-damned, thrice-damned Cause. Why should he care? Let Blake face this creature. Let him recruit her, and six of her closest demon friends. Let him damn himself. It was none of Avon's responsibility, none of his concern. It had never been his job to save Blake from himself.
A moment of silence. And then the sound of the clasp snicking back. No noise of the lid moving, but Blake whispering, as if in prayer, "Are you in there?"
And suddenly, she was there. Avon looked up, saw her smiling at Blake, that smile she had had for him in the village, and for her victim. He wanted to lunge at her, rip at her throat, no matter how futile such action might be, but he was cemented to the spot, even his voice paralyzed.
"You wished to speak with me, Roj Blake?" Her voice held that same note of chill amusement that Avon remembered.
Blake was gazing at her with something sickeningly like awe. "Yes," he breathed. Then, bolder, more himself: "Yes. I understand I have you to thank for my life."
The smile became a laugh. "Oh, you have that one to thank." A nod of the head toward Avon. "He valued you more than wealth, or safety, or the defeat of the Federation." She was looking at Avon now, a shining mockery in her eyes.
And Blake's were widening. "Defeat...?" He looked at Avon, accusing, angry. More angry than he had been at his own death, and clearly written on his face was: "Avon you had the chance to destroy the Federation with a word..." Avon knew that look, knew it far, far too well. It was the look of a man betrayed.
If he had been able to move, he would have slumped to the floor.
Blake held his gaze for a moment more, then turned deliberately back to the alien, his best rabble-rousing manner firmly in place. "If you could help..." he began. But she reached out, stopped him with a finger to his lips.
A finger to his lips...? Avon tried to scream. In his head he was howling, raging, shouting No! and Blake! and Damn you!, and, for some reason, desperately, kill ME! But outside his head there was only Blake's shallow breathing, and her finger on Blake's lips, and her eyes looking deep, deep into Avon's, with a cold, cold smile.
And then, calmly, casually, she removed her finger, and looked Blake in his wide, uncomprehending eyes, and said "When you have something to offer me."
Then she was gone. Avon discovered by the way he was shaking that he could move again.
There was an argument, of course. Oh, not over the alien; it seemed that Blake had said all he intended to say on that subject for the moment, though Avon never doubted for an instant that thoughts of her were still churning dangerously inside Blake's head. No, as always, the argument was over their next course of action. Avon, whose desire to be off this accursed planet was growing minute by minute, thought it obvious that the only rational thing to do would be to make their way to the spaceport, work out some way of stealing a ship, and pray that the blockade, designed as it was to keep people out, would be unlikely to trouble a ship bent on leaving. Blake, never one to do the only rational thing, refused to set foot off Gauda until he had seen for himself the status of his former base.
And so, of course, Avon now found himself traipsing back through the woods in the direction of the last place he ever wanted to think about, let alone revisit, and regretting that he had ever so much as deigned to meet Blake's eyes when first approached by him on the London.
He knew they were close when he stumbled across a place where the dirt and leaves of the forest floor had been disturbed and belatedly recognized the spot. He had hidden Orac here, in those last few minutes of relative sanity. And it had been the first place he'd gone afterwards, of course; not because he'd retained any great presence of mind, but simply because it had been the only place he could think of to go, and Orac the only thing he'd had left to call his own. Except that, like everything else, it was gone. He wondered, idly, if Orac would enjoy working for the Federation. At least when a machine joined one's enemies, one couldn't properly call it betrayal. Yet another reason to prefer machines to people. Perhaps he should have wished for Orac back instead of Blake; it might be just as much of a pain, but at least he could win the arguments with it in the end.
It was the smell that hit them first. A sudden shift of the wind, and it abruptly overwhelmed them. Unmistakable: death.
They exchanged a troubled glance, all conflict and confusion forgotten in a brief moment of surprising mutuality as they read in each other's eyes: I do not want to look. I do not want to see. But Avon had almost grown accustomed to looking at that which he did not want to see, and Blake... Ah, Blake had always had that stubborn courage, had always been willing to stare the worst in the face. It was, Avon realized, one of those rare qualities he had actually admired in Blake. The wave of affection it inspired in him now, however, merely confused him, and he felt the emotion settling into his stomach to blend sickeningly with the churning disgust induced by the wafting stench.
As one, they crept their way to the top of the rise that overlooked the base, concealed themselves low in the tangled brush and weeds... and looked.
Blake swore faintly, his voice broken. Avon himself could not find the breath to speak.
The pit was huge, a gaping raw wound in the earth. And it was filled with bodies. Even at this distance, he could see them too clearly: a protruding limb here, a lolling head there. Abruptly, vividly, he imagined Vila at the bottom of that pile, a charred corpse buried under a stifling weight of charred corpses, sightless eyes gazing at him in silent rebuke. The other faces followed: Tarrant, his curls soaked in blood, boyish face bruised and bloated in death, though not, of course, into merciful unrecognizability. Soolin, her icy beauty, too, reduced to mortal ugliness, the shining hair of which she'd been so proud lying limp and lifeless as the rest of her. Dayna. Dayna, to whom he'd brought one death after another, her once-flawless chocolate skin grey and cold and the glint gone from her dead, accusing eyes.
He did not realize that he'd stopped breathing, and would probably have been content to go on not breathing until he joined them, pulled by the collective magnetism of the dead into death himself, a death long deserved and too long delayed. It was Blake who brought him back again: the sound of Blake scrambling wildly back down the hillside, of Blake making a horrible un-Blake-like keening noise, of Blake doubling over, and holding his stomach, and retching.
He was beside Blake without thinking about it, an arm across those broad, heaving shoulders. He found himself acutely aware of everything that made up this moment, every detail and movement of the man he held as vivid and haunting as the vision of those dead faces had been. The tears on Blake's cheeks. The way he was shaking. The sour smell of his vomit, the way it blended with the sickly-sweet odor of his comrades' deaths. The choking half-sobs that rose up from his throat between heaves.
Avon held him steady through it all, until at last Blake's spasms were reduced to nothing more than a residual shuddering. He said nothing, but leaned his head against Blake's for a moment, noting with that same terrible clarity the feeling of sweaty curls against his forehead. And then, squeezing Blake's shoulder, he said. "I'll be right back."
"Avon?"
He ignored the question Blake made of his name, his full concentration on rounding the curve of the hill as rapidly as possible, putting himself out of Blake's sight. Blake was weak. It would take him some time to follow, if follow he did, and that time Avon was determined to use.
Steeling himself against a recurrence of those images (the dead are only corpses), he peered above the ridgeline again, this time focusing not on the bodies, but on the soldiers who walked among them. At least a dozen, he figured, slinging bodies about with a grotesquely casual disgust. Two of them had their masks off and were leaning against the building, passing a bottle back and forth and laughing at some joke that apparently had to do with the dead woman slumped near their feet.
He smiled. Then he moved back to where he would not be observed -- not by Blake, not by the Federation -- and, still smiling he fixed his gaze into the empty air ahead of him and said "I have something to offer you."
He was mildly surprised when she actually appeared. "Yes, Kerr Avon? And what have you to offer me?"
He waved a hand in the direction of the base. "Them."
Calm laughter twinkled in her eyes. "Them? And how is it that their lives are yours to give?"
"Their lives are mine to take," he said, "by right of revenge."
She gave him the sort of look one might give a small boy who has just made an amusing grammatical error. "But you have no means of taking them. And should I desire their lives, I am more than capable of doing so with no leave from you." She gave him a darkly radiant smile. "You pretend to offer me a gift, Kerr Avon, but what you really desire is to use me as your tool of revenge."
"All right," he said, all his teeth showing now. "You've found me out."
She turned her head, as if she could see the troopers through the solid bulk of the hillside. Well, probably she could. Then she looked back at him, her smile replaced with a thoughtful expression. "You interest me," she said. "You fear me, and yet you call me to you. You do not believe me a fool, and yet you attempt to manipulate me with logic you know is weak."
He was weary of games. "Yes or no?"
She tilted her head at him. "Yes," she said at last. "But now it is not I who am indebted you."
And before he could respond to that, she had vanished. From somewhere on the other side of the hill, he thought he heard a faint scream. His smile grew.
When he returned to Blake, all he said in response to his questioning gaze was, "Let's go find the spaceport." This time, Blake didn't argue.
When finally out of the range of that sickening smell (which Avon liked to imagine was now increased by the stench of at least another dozen corpses), they stopped, Blake seating himself heavily and without warning on a fallen log and rubbing at his mouth with a shaky hand.
Wordlessly, Avon handed him the water bottle. He took a mouthful, rolled it around in his mouth, spat. Eventually, he gave a hollow laugh and said, "You'd think I'd be used to the sight of death by now."
"Drink some of it," Avon said. "It will help." Help for the body, of course. The only kind of help there was.
"I doubt it," said Blake, but drank anyway, carefully. Then: "Where did you go off to?"
"I... wanted a moment to myself." True enough, as far as it went. Sentimentalist that he was, Blake would probably draw his own false conclusions. And, knowing Avon's dislike of being forced to acknowledge sentiment, hopefully he would not press.
But Blake seemed preoccupied in thoughts of his own, swirling the water round and round in the bottle, staring at it as if its mindlessly circular motion might hold some kind of answer for him. Finally he looked up, dull, shadowed eyes staring at Avon out of a face that looked far too old for flesh that had been freshly re-created last night. "Why did you bring me back, Avon?"
Self-pity? There was a time when Avon might have felt contempt at that, but he had become far too intimately acquainted with that emotion in recent days to be able to find it in him to point a finger at Blake. Besides, what did Blake have to live for? A stinking pile of corpses that had once been his friends? A chance to bask in the warm glow of his life's failure? The charming company of the man who had murdered him? Avon felt an incongruous stab of sympathy. After all, his own life had come to seem like a bad joke that, pointlessly, just kept going long after what should have been the punch line. Perhaps he had done Blake no favors.
What he said was, "Upset that I denied you your chance to be a martyr to the Cause?"
Dark fire flashed behind those dull eyes, locking onto his. "Is that what you were doing, Avon? Making me a martyr?"
To his shame, it was Avon who broke that locked stare first. But Blake merely sighed, the dangerous tone once again leaching from his voice, leaving him sounding merely... petulant. "I don't understand you, Avon. You say you want to be rid of me, and then you come looking for me. You come looking for me, and when you find me, you shoot me!" (Funny, how Avon had to turn his head away at that.) "Then, after you've killed me, you bring me back to life. What do you want, Avon?"
Well now, there was a ridiculous question if ever there was one. What could there possibly be left for him to want? "I told you. I made a mistake."
"Oh, I'll say you did." A pause. Then, "Avon? What the alien said..."
Here it comes.
"...Did she really offer you the chance to bring down the Federation?"
"Was that a mistake on my part, too, Blake?" he snarled. "What do you want me to do? Rectify it? Shall I call her, Blake? Tell her I've changed my mind? What shall we offer her? Your life? Mine? Why not?" Why not? Suddenly, he couldn't think of a single damned reason. He opened his mouth to summon her...
...and was stopped by a hand on his arm. "No."
He shut his mouth, quirked an eyebrow.
"Please, Avon. Not... not now. I..." Blake trailed off, trying to speak something with his eyes. Avon stared at them. Sorrow? Pity? Something... deeper? Suddenly he felt an old and dark desire burning, that desire he knew from Liberator: to be cruel to Blake. To make that bleeding heart bleed, and force upon that galaxy-embracing soul the individual passion of hatred.
"She kills, Blake. That's what she does. She lives on individual human lives. She takes her power from them." The hand tightened on his arm. He continued, relentlessly. "It took at least twenty-nine to bring you back, Blake. I saw them. I counted. Twenty-nine. Three of them were children."
Blake tried to pull away, and this time it was Avon who held him, forcing Blake to watch as he smiled. It felt good to twist the knife. Like stabbing it into his own heart.
"How many lives to ruin the Federation, I wonder? Hundreds? Millions? Do you care? I certainly don't."
"Dammit, Avon!"
"And why should you care? What are a few more sacrifices to you? Just one more offering on the altar of your Cause. After all, you've already sacrificed your own life, your friends' lives, your integrity…"
Blake at last wrenched away from him, turning his back. Avon saw that he was trembling. Then Blake whirled around again, turned to bore into him with his stare. Avon felt his smile faltering.
"I have one question for you, Avon." The voice still trembled, even though the shoulders had stopped. A rage-tremble: Avon had succeeded. "Did you know?"
For a moment, he was genuinely confused. By the question, by... By whatever the hell it was he was doing here. "Know?" he echoed, dumbly.
"Know, Avon. When you told her to resurrect me. Did you know?"
"Would it matter if I did?" A rhetorical question... one that, suddenly, he was desperate to know the answer to.
But Blake said, "Damn you, Avon," and, shouldering their supplies, stalked off into the woods.
Avon stood there a moment, staring off into nothingness, wondering... Wondering who the hell this person was that he had become, and when, exactly, it had happened. When his eyes focused again, he saw her, watching from the trees, with that same, ever-present look of amusement. Better than a soap-opera viscast to her, were they? "Damn you, too," he muttered in her direction, and turned to follow Blake. Blake knew where the spaceport was. And Blake had the supplies.
He was on the Liberator, and it was falling to pieces. Terminal, he realized. They were orbiting over Terminal, and he had to find Blake, to get him off the ship before it self-destructed. But where was Blake, damn it? He'd disappeared... Before the ship started decaying, he'd disappeared to...
Escape pod! That was right, Blake had gone to an escape pod. Avon found him there, in the pod bay. Standing there, silent, with three huge, bloody holes in his chest.
"Blake!" he shouted. "We've got to get off the ship!" Blake was wounded. I have to get him into the medical bed on Terminal.
Blake gave him a thoughtful look, absently plunged a finger into a wound, up to the knuckle, and scratched. "You've got a funny way of showing it," he said, a complete non sequitur.
"Blake! Come on!" He needed to make Blake leave. But for some reason he couldn't reach Blake, couldn't touch him. He turned, scanning the corridor behind him desperately for help.
Tarrant was there, his hair matted down with blood. "Leave him, Avon. He betrayed you."
"No!"
Abruptly, he realized that Tarrant wasn't alone. He had his arm around Anna. She was making that sour face of hers. "But he did, my love. Right from the very beginning."
Vila was behind them. "She's right, Avon. Blake sold you. He's going to toss you out an airlock and collect the bounty from Servalan."
"No!" No. Someone had betrayed someone. He remembered... He knew that. Couldn't quite remember what, or how, but... But not Blake. Blake would never betray him. Not Blake.
He turned back to Blake, to tell him this, and saw that he was standing there with the alien. "Your alien and I are going to go off together," he said. The alien smiled and held a finger up to her lips, her eyes sparkling as if to say "Shh! Don't tell the secret!"
Suddenly, there was a gun in his hands, and he had to stop Blake, had to save him from the alien, from himself, had to save him, so he raised the gun, and he raised the gun, and he fired…
And woke. Woke, to the sound of Blake's voice. No, that wasn't right, must still be the dream. He had killed Blake; Blake was dead.
Oh. No. Reality intruded on him, unwelcome, again. No, Blake was no longer dead, was here with him in the moonlight woods of Gauda Prime, standing the second watch. But, wait, then, who was he talking to...? Avon grew cold. He lay there, with his eyes shut and his heart hammering ridiculously, listening.
"...but I require no more power, Roj Blake." A familiar female voice, rimed with cold humor. "I was depleted from my long sleep, yes, but now my energies are strong again."
"So you don't need to kill?"
"'Need,' is a relative term. But, no, I do not require lives to give me energy. I will not require them for a very long time, by your standards, if I remain free. And I will remain free."
How many did she kill, I wonder? he thought, trying to breathe as though he still slept. And why is she telling him this?
A pause. "Yes, that's another thing. You were imprisoned in that sarcophagus, weren't you? Obviously, you're not quite as all-powerful as you might have us think, if something more powerful than you was able to keep you there."
"I am all-powerful as far as you are concerned, human. And, as for the being which imprisoned me... Pray that you never meet it, Roj Blake." No answer. She continued, "It does not, in any case, concern you. What matters to you is that I am powerful enough to give you that which you desire."
Breathe. Breathe.
"I never asked for anything from you!"
"No. Not in words. But you are that desire, Roj Blake. Your entire being is that desire. You ask. With your every breath, with every heartbeat, with the firing of every synapse, you ask. I know. I know your mind, your heart. I rebuilt the patterns that constitute you from out of dead matter and entropy."
"And, what?" Avon could hear the hope in his voice, and the dread. "You're offering to destroy the Federation for me? Out of the goodness of your heart?"
"For a price," she corrected.
A bleak laugh. "What could I possibly have that you'd want?"
A silent moment, then, as if she made some gesture that Avon could not see behind his closed lids. Then Blake, in tones of horror: "No!" And again, calm, this time, and angry: "I thought you said you had no more need of killing."
"And I also said, Roj Blake, that 'need' is a relative term. You humans eat for nutrition, yes?, but also for pleasure. To savor the taste, the texture of your food. It is not much different for me. And that one..." Another pause. "That one, I think, will be a pleasant texture, indeed."
Ah.
"Avon's life is not mine to give you!"
"Is it not?" she said, at the same time he thought, Isn't it? "The flavor of a life is always much sweeter when it is given up willingly. And that one is eager to die for you."
He hid his smile in the crook of his arm.
"Damn you! I don't want anything from the likes of you, and you are not taking Avon!" Blake sounded as if he were ready to physically attack her. That could prove interesting. But for a long moment after that, there was silence, and then the sound of Blake swearing, muffled, as if his hands were covering his face. No, Blake would never betray him. Not Blake. The fool.
She was gone when finally he opened his eyes, and Blake was staring off into the forested nothingness. They said no more to each other than they had the previous night.
Once they'd reached the town, getting their hands on a ship was almost anticlimactic. Spaceport security was a joke; all it took was a quick bit of breaking-and-entering at the Port Control office. (And had he ever thanked Vila for those lock-picking lessons he now employed so handily? He didn't think he had. Odd, that he should only desire to do so, now, when there was no Vila left to thank...) A few moments with the spaceport's computer system, and they had all the necessary authorization and access codes for a two-man freighter. No luxury craft, true, but adequate to their needs. His fingers danced over the keyboard as he covered up the last traces of his tampering, feeling pleased, as always, to once again be practicing the skill by which he had made his living before he had become a revolutionary, a criminal, a fool.
"All right," he said to the watchful Blake. "That's done it. Let's go." To his surprise, Blake clapped a hand on his shoulder and said, "Good work, Avon. Nice to know you haven't lost your touch." He felt ridiculously pleased at that, then annoyed with himself for feeling pleased, then amused at himself for feeling annoyed. Making no external acknowledgement, he led the way to their new ship, walking calmly across to the craft as if they were the legitimate owners. Which, as far as the port authority's computers were concerned, they were.
The proper codes input, the ship opened up to them at once. Blake seated himself on the flight deck, looking around. "Well, it's not the Liberator," he said ruefully, "But it'll do."
Avon hesitated by the door. "Blake... You can fly this yourself." There, he'd made the offer, if not directly.
Blake gave him a mildly exasperated look. "Avon, sit down."
He sat. Not that it should matter, certainly not now, but he found himself glad, nevertheless. It was good, somehow, to spend these moments in Blake's company, even with the awkward silence he'd imposed between them.
They worked smoothly together, now, as though they hadn't spent the last two years apart. Avon piloted. He might not be Jenna, but he was competent enough; this task, at least, he would not fail at. Blake transmitted the necessary codes to take them out of the port and through the blockade, monitored for signs of hostility or pursuit, of which, miraculously, there were none.
And then they were through, and free, at last, of Gauda Prime.
He rose, turned to Blake. "You look tired, Blake. Why don't you get some sleep? I can handle the ship." Indeed, Blake did look exhausted. And his sleep last night, Avon knew, had been as troubled and fitful as Avon's own.
"We do have to talk, Avon."
"Your mind will be clearer after you've had some sleep," he said gently.
Blake rubbed a hand across his eyes, eyelids clearly drooping. "Perhaps you're right about that," he admitted. Blake, accepting both logic and his own personal weaknesses. Well, that had been worth living long enough to see. "After all, I don't suppose you'll be going anywhere while I'm asleep, given that we're in space."
Avon said nothing.
"All right. You've convinced me. You will wake me if you need me?"
"Yes."
Blake turned to leave the flight deck, and Avon, suddenly, found his hand was on Blake's shoulder, holding him back. He looked into Blake's eyes, needing to say... What? "Blake..."
"Yes, Avon?" Blake seemed willing to wait for the words.
He couldn't say them. "...Nothing."
Blake reached out, squeezed him on the shoulder, and left.
"I'm sorry," Avon whispered after him. But those weren't quite the words, either.
He waited half an hour, his mind almost blank, his heart, strangely, filled with something vaguely akin to peace. Then he locked the flight controls, coordinates set for a distant, neutral planet, as safe as anywhere got. Carefully, he programmed the ship's computer to watch for other vessels and sound an alarm to wake Blake if anything were detected.
Then, self-indulgent, he went to the ship's tiny sleeping bay to stand over the bed where Blake lay in deep, if not untroubled, sleep. In the dim light he studied the lines on Blake's face and the shadows under his eyes, clear reminders that only the external scars had been removed. Whole... in body. Of course. But he would live, and Avon permitted himself an irrational feeling of relief at the thought.
He reached out, tentatively, brushing his hand against Blake's hair where it fell across his forehead. Then, slowly, careful not to wake the sleeping man, he bent and touched his lips lightly to Blake's. He held the kiss a moment longer than he meant to, savoring the taste, engraving it upon his mind. He straightened, surprised at the intensity of the emotion welling up in him. But this was no better a time to give in to regrets than any other moment of his life had been. Wordlessly, he trailed one final touch along the back of Blake's hand, and he turned, and went back up to the flight deck.
He stared into nothingness, calmly, and said "I want to talk to you."
Suddenly she was there, as he had known she would be. She was not smiling this time, but regarded him instead with a strange expression. Curiosity? Bemusement? Was that a flash of anticipation in her alien eyes, or did he merely flatter himself?
"I still owe you a debt," he said.
"Yes. You do."
"I know what it is that you want." He smiled. "But I should like to think that my life is worth more than the inconvenience of dispatching a few Federation troopers."
She seemed to consider that. "Yes," she said finally. "I will agree with that, Kerr Avon."
"Well," he said. "I suspect you know what it is that I want."
"I know what Roj Blake wants."
"Then you know what I want."
She nodded, slowly. Acceptance. He felt... relief. "Make it as bloodless as possible," he said. Then thought of adding except for Servalan, but stopped himself. No, keep this businesslike. Simple. Simple... Amazing, how simple it was...
She stood there a moment, regarding him with that inscrutable alien expression. Then, surprising him, "Your love for that one is very strong." A simple statement of fact, as if she were categorizing the behavior of some zoological specimen.
He laughed derisively. "'Love' is not a word it would have occurred to me to use." But, why not? Why not be honest with himself? It could hardly matter now. Love Blake? He felt the corners of his mouth curling upward. Love Blake? Well, of course I do. It just makes the joke all the richer, doesn't it? Or, perhaps, just perhaps, it was the one missing piece that made some sort of sense of it all. "Of all the things I knew myself to be," he said, wryly, "I have at last come to recognize the fool."
She was looking at him as if she understood, and suddenly he felt annoyed. Let's just get it over with. All of it, over with. "Do we have a deal?" he asked, his voice an eager rasp.
Alien eyes bored into him, alien mind pressing against his own. She nodded, very slowly. "Yes."
He grabbed her hand, pressed her cold, pale fingers to his lips. She smiled then, and he closed his eyes against the sight. His lips parted, as they had when he had kissed Blake, the memory of that taste strong in his mind. Goodbye, Blake. I know you won't thank me for this, but I'm glad of it, anyway.
He could feel the fragments of his mind whirling apart now, memories flooding out of him. It was a relief to let them go.
Goodbye, Blake. It seems I do love you. Imagine that...
And he was emptying, dissolving, pouring out of himself and into her, into nothingness, into blissful nothingness. It was like release, like innocence, like nearly-forgotten joy. It was like... freedom. Like freedom, the first he had ever known.
And when she withdrew her hand, the smile that remained on his face, for once, bore no trace of irony, or of loss, or of pain.