おまけ劇場 (Bonus Theater): Fall of the Empire
ThunderCats in its entirety © Warner Bros.
Fall of the Empire © WAR-Operative
Fading Echoes
If he could breathe, he would sigh.
Jaga pulled himself out of the data stream. It took a lot of energy to cloak his binary code with a holographic image, but he preferred it over his disembodied synapses sort of spreading across thousands of years of accumulated and fragmented data. He held up his hands to his new-formed eyes, and nodded when he perceived them correctly. Aged, familiar hands, leached of color, glowing faintly blue – but at least they had five fingers and opaque skin.
If his feet weren't so well-formed, well, no one was looking.
On the downside, emotions were stronger in this form. A wave of regret caused his image to ripple. He gripped his staff, aching to believe that the wood beneath his palm was real. These moments of weakness visited, or rather tormented, him often, since he was the only creature of agency inside the data stream. To put it bluntly, he was lonely. No amount of wishing would change his reality. He'd transitioned from life to death through the pain of having his soul sucked from his body with evil sorcery, but Mumm-Ra had not allowed him to pass on to the Great Sky Cat's Lair. Instead, he'd been imprisoned, tortured, and had finally chosen exile inside the Book of Omens. The reasoning had been sound, which had been to help the new Lord of the ThunderCats save Third Earth. However, it had been a blind gamble. Jaga could not have known what would happen to his spirit inside this matrix of technology and sorcery. He and the Book were now one. It wasn't even possible to take form like this without someone else's meticulously recorded memories fraying its edges.
It was an annoyance only. A Thunderian cleric had years of training to aid in mental concentration. He controlled his sense of self without effort and then swept an arm to the side, his furred cloak fluttering. Summoned by his will, soft, new-green grass sprang up on a hillside. Remembered warmth beat down on his shoulders from a flawless blue sky. He blinked up at it. This was one of those rare Third Earth days when there wasn't a moon to be seen, which was probably one of the reasons Lion-O had held on to the memory so fiercely.
But definitely not the most powerful reason.
Jaga walked into the reconstructed memory, smelling the springtime air in the odd way of pure data: not with his nose, but with lines of code. Patiently, he waited for the rest of the requested information to render. A breeze played with his beard, birds twittered in the flowers, and a young, red-maned lion charged headlong through all of it, in hot pursuit of something that parted the grasses like a thick snake. He ran well, Jaga noted, no longer the soft prince of the palace. It was really a shame that Claudus could not see his son now.
The ridiculous urge to sigh returned, but Jaga merely glided after the youth. If Lion-O had known that accessing the Book also recorded some of his own memories, he might not have used it so often, but there was no need to enlighten him at this juncture. The Book's purpose was to preserve history. It was an impartial witness. Even if some of its circuitry had been scrambled in the crash, the magic that gave it and the trapped jaguar soul inside it their semblance of life could not be corrupted.
Meanwhile, Lion-O lost sight of his prey. While he stood there panting and furious, Jaga touched the top of his staff to the lion's head. He'd done this several times before, wanting to understand.
Light flared at the contact, made up of a billion strings of ones and zeroes, and when it receded like water into a drainage pipe, Jaga flowed with it into Lion-O's body until both vanished.
..::~*~::..
"Where are you?" I snarled through my teeth.
Nothing answered. I didn't expect it to, but I continued scouring the grass, looking for that little mechanical pest. Hadn't I banished him? Told him to go after his friend, or mistress, or whatever she was? What on Third Earth was Sunny doing here, so close to Avista's remains? The other berbils working with us to repair the city never mentioned him; I assumed even they understood the concept of traitor. I'd only caught a glimpse of him myself, and it had made me so angry I'd taken off after him without thinking it through.
Somebody was sure to give me grief about it later, but I didn't care. Any second now, I expected to sweep aside the next bundle of grass and find him staring up at me with his round face, black eyes shining, the picture of cublike innocence.
Instead, I found her.
She looked different. There was the white hair I knew so well, thin and blowsy the way a cat's mane would never be. Albino-pale skin, flushing pink across her terrified face when she caught sight of me. Pale blue eyes, the pupils round as black moons, already wide and getting bigger. She stood up swiftly and backed away from me, her expression stricken, her golden berbil cradled protectively in her arms.
Echo. The traitor. The human. Mumm-Ra's spy.
My best friend.
A stab of pain clenched around my next breath when I thought those words. That was what was different. This wasn't the bruised, battered, bleeding Echo who had stolen the Tech Stone for our enemy. This was Echo how she used to look, back in Thundera.
"What are you doing here?" I asked her roughly, drawing the Sword of Omens. It stayed silent in my hands, and I frowned at it, but leveled it at her, anyway. Just in case.
She frantically shook her head, throat working. "N-no," she managed to gasp. Her knuckles went bone-white, fingers clenched in Sunny's fur. "I d-d-d-don't kn-kn-know why I'm here. Or how I g-got here."
Surprise nearly made me drop Omens, but a flood of fury tightened all of the muscles in my arms and I dropped into a crouch. "Echo!" I growled. "Don't give me that. That amnesia thing – those days are over! What are you doing here?"
"I d-d-d-d-d-d-d-" She scowled at me, clamping her lips shut over the words she physically couldn't say. But when I didn't relax my stance or try to help her speak as I would have done, back in that other life, she took a huge breath and tried again. "Y-you're the one bringing up th-th-the amn-n-nesia thing. Why don't you tell m-me why I'm here? You banished me! You tried to kill me! You wouldn't listen to the truth! You're the one who betrayed me!"
Her stutter cleared up as if it had never existed, and her blue eyes hardened into stone. Tears welled up and spilled over pale lashes, pouring down her cheeks. Appalled, I stared at her. Echo . . . was crying?
"You lied to me," I snarled. "This whole time, you've been lying."
"I never lied to you," she said, the steel in her voice matching the defiant straightening of her spine. In an instant, the tears dried up.
"You were never entirely truthful, either. Omens wounded you," I reminded her. "It can't be used against a force of good, Echo."
"Yeah?" She laughed, and it was ugly, transforming her fragile human features into a mask of bestial anger. "Well, guess what, Mr. Force of Good? You sold me into slavery once. Remember that?"
It was as if she'd punched me in the gut, unbalancing me. I had done that. I'd had to, in order to win Omens back from the Duelist. Didn't she know that?
"Oh, I knew," she said mockingly, and I bared my fangs at her; could she read minds now? She was still changing, the girl I used to hang out with when I made my escape from the palace slowly being replaced by the warrior I'd come to rely on in our journey. "Knowing didn't make it any better. Kind of like how I had to wield the Sword of Plun-Darr to save you. How did that make you feel?"
"So, what, are you saying we're even?" I asked in disbelief.
She shook her head, her white hair flowing loose down her back, and set Sunny on his feet. She was taking the wrappings off her hands – wrappings I hadn't noticed until then. "Oh, no, Lion-O. We'll never be even. I could have been anything you wanted, and you chose to make me a traitor. Nothing is ever going to match that."
"I chose?" I hissed. "I didn't do anything. It was all there in that journal of yours. You have always belonged to Mumm-Ra."
"Maybe I did. Maybe I didn't." She threw out her hands, and the wrappings fell away. Scabs and scars crusted the furless skin of her arms. Seeing them in daylight made me want to retch. That was how she'd looked when she made her escape with Mumm-Ra. Her eyes, however, were hers again, clear and full of light. "I still don't know. But everything I did was for you."
I ignored that. I'd heard enough of her lies. "Are you a phantom?" I asked, rattled by the way she continued fluctuating between the Echo of the past and the Erica of now.
"I kept looking for phantoms," she said cryptically. "All I ever found was myself. I should have just left it alone, but I suppose answering questions is human nature."
"I wouldn't know," I said.
"No," she said, mouth sad. "You wouldn't."
"What's that supposed to mean?" I snapped. "I'm getting tired of –"
I broke off with a grunt. What felt like bands of iron had suddenly latched onto me, freezing me in place. I couldn't use Omens or the Claw. I couldn't speak. I could barely breathe.
"You've always been a little dense, Lion-O," she said. She looked up into my eyes as if searching for something. Then she lifted one of her ruined hands and put it gently against the side of my face.
I couldn't recoil. I couldn't do anything. I was at her mercy. If she wanted to kill me, now was the time to do it.
But she didn't.
Instead, she raised herself up on her toes and pressed her lips to mine. That was it, a fleeting contact, a shock to the system. It changed everything in a way that a kiss from Pumyra never could.
Her thumb caressed my cheekbone, and she stared at me as if trying to memorize something written across my face.
"I loved you," she whispered brokenly.
Loved? I had time to wonder about the past tense before pain erupted inside my skull and it all went dark.
..::~*~::..
It was a thing he never thought he'd miss, the simple act of a sigh. Jaga pulled himself out of Lion-O as puzzled as ever.
Lion-O could not remember what happened between losing consciousness in the field and waking up in the cat camp a couple of hours later. WilyKat and Kit had found him sprawled on the floor of his own tent, and Cheetara had diagnosed him with exhaustion and sent him right back to bed. No one had seen him leaving, never mind returning, which made him question the validity of his own memory. Had it been a dream? A visitation from a phantom?
Or something so frighteningly real that his mind had shut down in order to protect him from it?
Jaga did not have the answer, either, nor could he reconcile the ferociously loyal and kindhearted human that Lion-O knew with the creature whose memories made up the bulk of the Book of Omens. She was a mystery, one that nagged at the undead cleric. Taking this troubling memory altogether from the young lion had been a kindness.
You were incorrect, Echo, Jaga thought wearily. It is not only humans who must find answers.
Only one thing was certain. The girl known as Echo was fading like her namesake without someone there to call her back. Jaga couldn't decide if that was a good thing or not. Truly, it was out of his hands. He was nothing but a spirit, trapped inside a book. Heartsick, he allowed his form to dissipate, and he once again tried to rest as his consciousness joined with the noisy, ever-flowing data stream.
A/N: Prompt used. The story takes place mid-spring. The story has a spirit in it. (Swiped from Mooncloudpanther.)
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Ever Yours,
Anne