It had all been for nothing.
All the small victories, the gains bought with the precious blood of those few that remained. For one shining moment, he'd dared dream that they could push back the invasion. That his strategies of unpredictable, but decisive strikes and scorched earth withdrawals mixed liberally with toe to toe battles of attrition where the enemy was least prepared had finally confounded these so called 'machine gods'. Guerrilla warfare had put a stopper in their 'inexorable' advance.
And then, in one fell swoop, all hope had been dashed, shattered like so much glass carelessly dropped on the unforgiving ground. The spearhead of their assault on the occupied Citadel, a destroyer named the Ardent Fury, had fallen into a devious snare of the enemy's design. It had been a trap all along. One he had lead his ship foolishly into, thinking for once that they'd had the upper hand. His ship and all of his men, taken. He would have been captured as well if it hadn't been for the devotion, and insubordination, of his most trusted lieutenant, Karsa.
He recalled the sting of a hypo, sedatives coursing through his veins, then someone shoved him into an escape pod. He had blearily watched his ship diminish into the distance before slipping away into a drugged haze. His last rational thought then had damned Karsa for tricking him into abandoning them at the end.
But it hadn't been the end. It would have been so much better, so much more merciful had that been the final fate of those comrades who'd given him so much of themselves, striven beside him to beat this monster that had crested the waves to swallow them all. But there had been no mercy, and the Reapers had done as they'd always done, reap. His men, their harvest.
Javik pushed back the pain of remembering as he squatted in the mud of this primitive planet. He was waiting for them, the ones who'd fallen to the enemy's influence, the ones who still pretended at life, who mocked his friends by wearing their faces. How he hated the Reapers.
He tasted blood as he unsheathed his knife and spat into the muck at his side. The claylike substance coated him from head to toe, it had even found its way inside his armor and gloves. He imagined a sea of it inside his boots and grimaced in revulsion.
There were only two left. They were out there somewhere, hunting him even as he hunted them. Engagement after engagement, battle after battle and he'd slowly whittled their numbers down to just these two, just Karsa and Rimbol. He bared his teeth at the irony of having to kill the one man he had trusted above all others, who had spared him the fate that had befallen the rest: Indoctrination.
He took some soot from his dead campfire and smeared it over his blade, concealing its shine in the black ash. And this is what he'd been reduced to, him, Commander Javik, the Scourge of Creytonia, the Butcher of East Paxl. Hiding in a mudhole, not a single decent weapon but this primitive knife, foraging and hunting for his food, how distastefully...barbaric. He felt utterly debased, brought low by his own monumental hubris.
Whatever else they'd done to Karsa, they'd let him retain his cunning. Javik's lip curled as he spotted a glowing pair of eyes in the fog, their unnatural blue radiance telling him that it was definitely an enemy. And that it was probably Rimbol. That meant Karsa was probably close by, waiting for Javik to take the bait before revealing himself. A month ago, he might have done it, might have rushed headlong into the fight, brash and arrogant. His fiery temperament had been a boon in the war against the Reapers, who were unable to adapt to unconventional strategies. He'd won enough encounters to become a thorn in the enemy's side.
He supposed he should take it as a compliment that the Reapers had had to take over the minds and bodies of the ones who knew him best in order to defeat him. And defeat him they had, in fight after fight, using every trick they'd learned from him. He'd made them pay dearly for each victory, but every loss had chipped away at the bonfire of rage and indignation in him until all that remained was despair and bitterness. And it had prevailed in each fight where righteous fury had not.
He seethed as he watched Rimbol approach his hiding place. Half buried in the cold mud, he knew his heat signature was obscured on their instruments. He kept two eyes on Rimbol and let the other two roam, trying to spy that other traitor. His guts churned at the word, knowing that it wasn't the whole truth, but it was a convenient lie. One that let him go through with this...murder. One at a time, he'd slaughtered his friends.
He must have made some noise, because that corrupted version of his gunnery officer swung its massive head round and seemed to look straight at the prothean. Javik stilled, tense and ready. His knife he held at a low angle, his mind already feeding him information about the man's racial vulnerabilities. Unlike Karsa, Rimbol was Prothean only in name, his people were descended from one of the many subjugated races. Three inches behind auricle, cranial weakspot. Just left of sternum, arterial junction. Base of throat, supernal diaphragm.
The inner catalogue of strike points was cut off as a rumble of rockfall to the north drew his quarry's attention. That's when Javik finally spotted the other one, up on the ridge, peering down into the canyon through its scope. He reinforced the thought, It. That is not Karsa any more. It is an imitation only.
The silhouetted shape moved on, shadowing Rimbol. Javik stalked in their wake to see if an opportunity arose to take out the one without the other knowing. Probably impossible if they were communing on a level below his awareness, but he thought perhaps something could be gained with more observation. Patience was a thing he'd learned from calamitous and recurring failure.
They were searching haphazardly, without any real pattern. Or at least it seemed so to him as he waded through the swamp after them. He observed them stopping and starting in perfect sync, there was clearly some kind of unspoken communication going on between the two. It was uncanny and boded ill for any plans he might have for separating the pair. No matter, his strategies had always been...fluid.
He saw for a second the glitter of four eyes on the ravine's rim and froze, holding his breath. Javik resisted the urge to duck and run. He was damned if he was going to let himself be flushed from cover like a prey animal. With relief, he saw the scrutiny pass over him and stuck to places shielded by outcroppings from above.
This canyon was opening up onto the floodplains, where there was precious little cover. Whatever he thought to do, he better do it quick. His advantages: He'd seen them first. He knew that they thought they knew what he would do and lastly, he knew the terrain, he'd had half a day of recon before they'd arrived, tracing the signal he'd intentionally leaked to one of their scouters. Javid had known full well who the Reapers would send after his crippled and depleted ship. So he'd prepared as best he could, though he didn't even have a proper weapon any more and no ordnance, rations, and barely any survival gear at all.
He had to draw them back into the narrow straits where the sheer rock walls would keep Karsa from interrupting his skirmish with Rimbol with troublesome rifle fire. He crouched beneath a generous overhang. Javik picked up a hand sized stone among those littering the ground at his feet and, letting his biotics flare, gave it a good heave toward the hulking shape of Rimbol in the twilit delta past the rock walls. It collided with that thing's head, sending him end over end. Rimbol scrambled to his feet with a bellow of rage. Scrabbling from up top told Javik that Karsa had been alerted.
Javik grinned a savage grin and bolted back into the ravine, knowing that Rimbol, if there was any part of Rimbol left in that monstrosity, had never been able to resist chasing something that was running away. It was a primitive instinct that Javik and many others in the crew had teased the tall alien relentlessly for. True to form, the squelching patter of feet running in mud behind him heralded the man's charge. Javik put on a burst of speed, dodging to the side to avoid gunfire from above.
He took a chance and glanced behind to see what Rimbol was armed with. Javik's teeth flashed in a smirk. A shotgun, well, he intended to stay well out of the effective range of that little toy. His heart pounded as he dodged and wove through half sunken trees and boulders. He got to a place that was so narrow that he could touch both walls with arms outstretched if he so chose and scrambled partway up the wall at a bend with a pinch point. He stole a look up and saw that his view of the sky was virtually nonexistent. Good, that meant that anyone standing on the edge couldn't see in either.
Below him, Rimbol had slowed his headlong sprint to a lope and just as he passed, Javik leapt out, silently snarling as he collided with the towering man, wrapping his legs around the thing's waist. Rimbol stumbled under his weight. In that moment of confusion, Javik ripped his sidearm away, throwing it with all his might in a random direction. It struck a rock wall, sparking as it broke into fragments, but Javik had no time to lament the loss of a potential weapon as Rimbol's huge hands found their way to his throat and squeezed.
His four eyes narrowed to slits as he struggled for air, glaring hatefully at the ruin of a man he was contending with. Rimbol's jutting horns, the ones he'd been so proud of, had been torn away at the root. In many places all over the beast's body where the skin had been peeled back, Javik could see cybernetics blinking away in their depths. Tubes ran in and out of Rimbol's viscera and Javik could see by the torn fabric around each intrusion that it had been no clean, clinical surgery that had put them there.
Sounds came out of Rimbol's widely gaping mouth, unintelligible moans that scraped across his nerves, making that hot anger he'd held so tightly bound rise hard and fast. His knife came up and plunged into Rimbol's wrists and he began to saw at the tendons. Those fingers finally loosened their vise like grip. Javik shifted his weight to wrench them both to the ground, using the momentum to spin them so he ended up behind Rimbol in a rear choke.
The creature thrashed in the mud, trying to dislodge him and, though his arms threatened to dislocate from their sockets and he nearly dropped his knife more than once, he hung on and with a short barking cry, slashed Rimbol's throat open all the way down to the spine. The blade skipped along the vertebrae, the jarring vibration of it crawling up his forearm. A short deluge of rank, black blood sprayed into his face and his armor's wide collar. He nearly retched in disgust, dry heaving as he pushed the corpse off and away from him.
A low sound grabbed his attention and he had just enough time to spare a thought for Karsa before he was grabbed up in a biotic lift. He grimaced, trying to quell panic as he rose out of the ravine. He cleared the foliage in time to see the end of a sniper rifle come swinging around to target him. In desperation, he did the only thing he could think of and threw his own lift. On himself. He wasn't even sure it would work, but a millisecond later he sent a prayer of thanks into the ether as his body rocketed to the side, confounding Karsa's shot.
The rock wall rose up to meet him as he spun lengthwise in the air and he lunged out frantically and barely caught its edge. Air rushed out from between clenched teeth as stone crashed into already bruised ribs. The sharp crack of a rifle sounded again and pain blossomed in his shoulder, nearly making him lose his grip. With a harsh shout, he pulled himself up over the rim and stood, facing his opponent across the gap, eyes darting for a place to hide behind. There, a small boulder. Javik threw a dark channel to disrupt Karsa's aim and bolted for the rock. He rolled the last few feet to dodge the rounds that peppered the ground at his heels.
He peeked around the obstruction and saw that Karsa was readying himself for a leap across the gap. Good, that only brought his enemy closer, within melee range. He tightened his grip on the knife as the thud of feet announced Karsa's arrival on his side of the ravine. He heard footsteps pad cautiously closer and decided on a course of action.
Javik straightened, moving out of cover. He locked gazes with his oldest and dearest friend, now only a shell of his former self. A puppet to those fiendish machines that plagued the galaxy. He bellowed a challenge, "Karsa!"
The thing tilted its head at him and lifted that weapon to end him with one loud, cacophonous report. But Javik knew that its effectiveness was halved, no quartered at short range and darted forward in a serpentine dash. He closed the distance and grabbed the barrel, pushing it away just as it fired. Agony lanced through his hand as it was burnt by the incredible heat that surged through the metal. The air next to his head was split by the round as it tore by, making his ears ring, leaving him dizzy.
Still holding onto the gun, he pivoted on one foot and lashed out with the other, planting his heel in Karsa's stomach. He tore the thing's grip away from the rifle's stock with a mighty yank. Karsa rolled backward from the force of the kick and came up armed with a knife of its own. Those four eyes that held blue fire pierced him then and he hesitated. Bad call, he caught a swipe right along his cheekbone inches from his eyes for the mistake and with an angry shout, tossed the rifle away, determination cutting through his sentimental weakness.
He circled left as it circled right and stayed in a ready crouch. Javik winced, favoring his injured shoulder. An unearthly voice drifted to him from the figure before him, "Your downfall is inevitable. There is no hope. Join us."
Enraged beyond words, he launched himself at the thing with a scream. With a lightning quick barrage, he forced it back, his blade ringing sharply against that other's as it parried almost every strike with preternatural speed. The ones that did breach its defenses to rip flesh and circuitry did very little to slow it down or keep it from riposting with skill. Soon his armor was striped with his own blood. Javik breathed heavily, the weight of it all started to slow him down, the wounds, the weariness.
He was tired, just so damn tired, but any traitorous thought he might have had about giving in and letting oblivion take him was staved off every time he caught a glimpse of that face. That face that had laughed with him on the barricades, argued strategy with him over the maps, had given him so much excellent insight and advice over the years. Karsa had deserved so much better than this.
How dare they? How DARE they destroy this brilliant soldier? What right did they have to do this? Who made them believe they had ANY RIGHT? Dimly, he was aware that he was shouting all this out loud, roaring it. His voice came back to him from the rocks, distorted echoes in the dark, japing at him in his own skewed subharmonics. His blood roared in his ears as he tapped that last reserve of cold fury that had sustained him through this slaughter. His veins were on fire as he leapt and danced, the knife an extension of his arm. Javik ignored the wounds that appeared in his flesh and putting aside any niggling doubts that this was the right thing to do, destroy the last vestige of his noble crew. It was the only thing to do, the only course left him.
Karsa rose to the challenge, strike for strike, as puissant as he'd ever been in true life, Javik's match in this as he'd always been. Maybe more so now that he'd been rewired for faster reflexes by the machines in his body. Javik became aware that he'd stopped using the detached 'it' just as the thing that wore his friend's countenance swept both legs out from under him in a low spinning kick. Javik landed on his back with a soft 'oof', his knife skittering off into the bushes and he tried to scramble away, but a boot came down hard on his chest, pinning him to the hard packed dirt.
Sneering in defiance, he glared up at Karsa and prepared for death...or worse. There was a long moment of stillness in that place as the adversaries stared at each other in silence. Javik snapped, "Well, what are you waiting for? Finish me, monster!"
There was a strange flicker in those lambent eyes for just a second and then Karsa reared back with the blade in his hand to do just that. Javik's hands searched for something, anything to distract that creature. His gloved hands closed on something around his neck. He tore it free, flinging it up into Karsa's face, thinking that he needed just a moment of imbalance to turn the situation around.
With unnatural swiftness, one of the Karsa's hands shot out and grasped the object flying toward his face and there was a flash of green light. Javik saw an expression of honest confusion run a course over that defiled prothean face and the monster stilled, his mouth dropping open in frank astonishment. Always one to take advantage, Javik heaved Karsa off him. He lunged to his feet as the man fell away, disarming him on the way with a quick twist of the wrist.
In a blur, Javik bowled the frozen thing over and straddled him, arm pumping as he stuck the blade in to the hilt repeatedly. The roaring fog in his head nearly blocked out the strange pained cries of limp Karsa below him. When reason reasserted itself, Javik saw what he'd thrown at his enemy, still clutched in that hand tightly. The Echo Shard, now it was his turn to be astonished as his gaze swung back to Karsa's face. What he saw nearly had him leaping back in utter shock.
Awareness, and a bone deep terror flared in those eyes. He felt his own face go slack, mirroring the dawning of those same horrible epiphanies. His friend's mouth opened. Javik jumped at the sound of Karsa's voice. It was his alone, weak and thready, "...Javik...?"
Blood leaked from Karsa's mouth, coating his teeth and lips in gruesome fashion. Javik trembled as a feeling rose up in him, something huge and terrifying, just on the edge of comprehension, something that threatened his very sanity. His breath became rapid and ragged as he focused solely on trying not to see the friend who lay under him, veritably perforated by his rabid and crazed attack. Vital fluids leaked from dozens of stab wounds, surely he couldn't last for long.
"...J-Javik, I am, there are...voices...What has happened...to me?" Heartbreaking, his heart was breaking and he blinked once, slowly, trying to push the past away before it broke him completely with bottomless want for earlier times, better times. His throat threatened to close in terrible remorse.
"You have been...indoctrinated, Karsa." He said, gently. He knew he should do it, he should end the man's suffering and his knife hand kept jerking where it lay against the jugular. He closed his eyes and tried to force his hand to move, to finish the deed. He silently screamed at the universe for delivering unto him this final and most cruel unkindness.
A hand closed over his and his eyes shot open to see tears, actual tears on that ruined face. Protheans did not weep, only the very young were allowed the luxury of tears. And why not? If there was ever a time to weep, it was now. It pulled an answering grief from his very depths, yet there was no outlet for the sorrow, not a trace of wetness on his own cheeks. Karsa tugged on his hand, not to beg for quarter, but to beg for relief.
Javik quailed, a cowardly part of him saying, tempting with a thought, Wait, wait for the monster to re-emerge. Then kill it. Karsa shook his head as though reading his mind and fought for breath, saying in wet, choked tones, "Do it...do...it now...while I am still...me."
With a hitching breath of anguish, he steeled himself and heard just as the knife began its deadly arc, a low whispered, "...brother..."
Javik did not know if it was him or Karsa who'd said it, only knew the hollow yearning it had sparked in the yawningly empty pit at the heart of him. That single word unveiling a thing never spoken of, but known.
He stayed like that for a long while, not a single thought in his head that manifested in any way coherently. Finally, when something did arise past the numbness, he had to search for the word for it as the feeling swept through him like a foul wind, along with the terrible realization of what it truly meant.
Horror.
Pure abject horror. Not at what the Reapers had done to his crew, his comrades, but at what they'd made of him. The true horror of what the Reapers were doing settled over him like a cloak of nettles. They changed even the ones who escaped, no one had been left unscathed, unaltered by the advent of the Reaper invasion. This is what they'd all been made into. Hollow people.
His own race changed irrevocably, to the point that blood ties like the one he shared with Karsa went unacknowledged in case it became a weapon in the enemy's hand. Cold, uncaring, callous, had they always been so? Or only since the invasion began had they truly become so utterly ruthless? Subconsciously, had he tried to reverse that terrible detachment when he'd brought his people together in the first place?
Yes. He knew that now, every decision to show mercy or gain cooperation by compromise slammed home with bone shaking force. He'd loved his men, beyond reason, he'd made them a part of him, they'd done miracles together, small but no less miraculous for their ultimate futility. He'd turned what others had labeled weakness into strength and been greater for it.
The Reapers had made him murder the very best parts of him.
As they'd done to everyone. What they did not take, they subverted and spoiled past all hope of redemption. The scale of it, the horrifying enormity of it. His guts churned and had he any food left in his stomach, it would no doubt have found its way out onto the clay of this desolate backwater planet. How many times had this happened over the cycles? How many times would it keep on happening?
For he had no illusions now that the Prothean Empire would fall. The Reapers had done their work well. There was no heart left in it, the Empire was as cold and bloodless as the Reapers could have ever hoped for. Fitting progeny, indeed. He doubted even the fabled Crucible could save them now, let alone those pathetic hibernation projects on the move out there. A last ditch effort that begged skepticism from even those who'd dreamt it up.
Without hope for victory, without a chance of survival, what was left for him? What use was it to even try?
But...
There was still this...offense, they had committed, as woefully inadequate a word as that was. This obscenity they'd visited on him, on every cycle. And it rankled deeply, a venom that made his blood boil. Here was a spark of fire deep in the soul of him and he blew on it gently to fan it into an inferno of vindictive wrath. Because without it, he had nothing, was nothing. He burned there, fiercely, though on the outside he was still just a man straddling the brother he'd murdered out of mercy, shoulders slumped in devastation.
Slowly, his lips peeled back from sharp teeth in a gaping wound of a smile that was more like a silent scream and had no small portion of madness in it. Javik shuddered violently as it crystallized in his mind, the final verdict. His hand drifted down his brother's arm and found the Echo Shard. He felt the hum of it even through the gloves. Tucking it safely away, Javik dropped his chin to his chest and let his eyelids lower over stinging eyes.
He whispered one word, a word that reverberated through his being as though he'd shouted it at the top of his lungs. A word that summed up the only reason he had left to live, the sole purpose of his existence from this point forward. No quarter given, no cost too great, no means too deplorable, he'd commit atrocity after atrocity to see it done. Gladly.
His tongue moved the word past his teeth, past his lips, dropping it on the skin of the world like a gift. His gift.
"Vengeance."
A/N: A slice of Javik's life. A little fieldtrip into the distant past. The story name? Well, who doesn't like a Moby Dick reference? And Javik is sooooo Ahab. (Ahab-y?, Ahab-esque? Ahab-ian? Ah, I just looked it up. It's 'Ahabian') Hope you enjoyed it. It was fun to write and I hope it's a worthy entry.