Legacy
by Sandrine Shaw
Jupiter's happy ending lasts eight months, twelve days, and a little over nine hours.
Horrible as the Abrasax siblings are, they are not the only horrible thing out there. Anyone that powerful, that ruthless, has enemies every bit as powerful and ruthless. Jupiter wishes Caine hadn't omitted that part when he gave her a run-down of all the things the average inhabitant of Earth wasn't aware of.
One morning, the streets are abuzz with the usual traffic, people going about their business, living their lives, mistaken about their uniqueness in the universe. By noon, it's a wasteland of debris and charred remains, burning cities and empty ghost towns, fires and explosions, dust and ashes.
Earth dies loudly and violently. Slash-and-burn rather than a harvest, and Jupiter is forced to watch it go up in flames from the confines of her cell on board one of the battleships circling high up in orbit.
Watching the macabre spectacle is barely bearable, but Jupiter can't look away.
"Why would you do that?" she sobs. "Why would you kill all those people who are nothing to you? What have they ever done to deserve this?"
Outside her cell, there's a woman in a metallic robe, her white hair piled up in a neat bun. Her wrinkle-less features suggest that she's about Jupiter's age, give or take a few thousand years. She gives a shrug that makes a mockery of the gravity of what just happened.
"Earth was important to the House of Abrasax," she explains. "Losing an estate this big and being deprived of such an amount of product will cripple Abrasax Industries. Their stock will take a dive, which will benefit the House of Glycon."
Jupiter wants to point out that the Abrasax siblings wouldn't have been able to harvest Earth, not while she or her descendants were around. But perhaps that's not a hurdle for people with a lifespan of dozens of millennia.
"What about me? Why am I still alive when you killed everyone else?"
Her captor smiles a perfectly pleasant, bland smile, the way a Starbucks barista smiles (smiled, Jupiter thinks; past tense - there are no coffee shops anymore, no more baristas, not on Earth) at rude customers eleven hours into an twelve-hour shift. "You're Seraphi Abrasax's recurrence, my dear. You're worth alive more than dead."
And once again, Seraphi's shadow hangs over Jupiter. Even from death, she's twisting Jupiter's fate, rewriting her story. It might be saving her life now, but that doesn't mean she can't hate Seraphi for it, for everything their incidental genetic match has cost her.
#
Two large, bulky-muscled lion splices drag her from her cell. She fights against their hold, but their hands are strong and clawed, and her struggles remain ineffective.
"Where are you taking me?" she asks, trying to stay on her feet as she's pulled through the dark corridors of the Glycon ship. Neither of them dignifies her with a response.
They arrive at the hangar where she's unceremoniously shoved into one of the smaller shuttles. She's barely given time to wonder if this is a kidnapping or a rescue, if she's being liberated or sold to the highest bidder, before there's a sharp prick at the side of her neck and her world goes dark.
#
Luxurious sheets enfold her like a silken cocoon when she wakes to the uncomfortable sensation of being watched. Panic claws up her throat and she jolts up, only noticing that she's naked beneath the covers when they start to slip.
From the far end of the spacious room, Balem Abrasax watches her.
He sits in a chair like on a throne, one leg folded over his thigh, his chin propped up on an arm. There's a fresh set of burn scars on the right side of his face, from his hairline all the way down his cheek and neck, disappearing into the high collar he wears. Clearly, the damage is beyond what RegeneX can fix. Jupiter feels a surge of satisfaction at the sight.
"You're alive." She makes it sound like an accusation, infusing the weight of you should have died at the refinery into the words.
His eyes briefly flicker from her face down her body before he meets her gaze again.
"So are you."
She's forgotten how grating the sound of his voice is, like chalk on a blackboard. Her skin rises in goosebumps and she grips the covers tighter.
Balem tilts his head, watching her with a detached kind of interest, like she's a strange creature under a scientist's microscope. "There is no need for a false sense of modesty. I've seen this body in all states of undress."
This body. Not hers. At least she hopes that he means Seraphi, and not that he's been creeping on her since his bounty hunters took her.
Jupiter's fingers clench so hard that her knuckles turn as white as the fabric they're holding on to. She scowls at Balem. "Yeah, well, it wasn't my body then. I really don't give a fuck whatever Oedipal bullshit you and your mother got up to, it doesn't give you the right to steal my clothes and watch me sleep like a creeper."
His outburst comes suddenly, without warning.
"I saved your life," he roars, rising from his chair with balled fists, and his voice echoes through the room like thunder. As quickly as it mounted, the rage passes, sullen anger left in its wake. His eyes are wet and accusing and his lip quivers with barely contained emotion. "You should be grateful. But you never appreciated anything I did for you, did you?"
He leaves before she can remind him that she's not Seraphi, that he never did anything for her other than kidnap her family and try to have her killed. A flurry of his black cape, a hiss of the door sliding shut behind him, and then he's gone. She breathes a little easier without his oppressive presence filling the room, but it's temporary relief at best.
#
From outer space, Earth looks like it always did: a blue planet steadily spinning around its axis, undeterred by human lives and human tragedy. Nothing indicates that there's nothing left down there, that everything she knew is gone.
She presses her palm against the window's cool security glass, as if her touch could restore the Earth to life, and dry sobs wrack her body. How do you mourn an entire planet? Civilizations, science, art, everything that's lost. It's impossible to grasp. All she can do is mourn the people she knew. Her mother. Her family. Her friends. Caine. Stinger and his daughter. The pizza delivery girl with the violet hair and the pierced lip who always smiled at Jupiter when she tipped her.
She doesn't notice Balem until he's standing beside her, looking down on what used to be her home with distaste on his face.
"They ruined the entire harvest."
The sound of her palm connecting with his scarred cheek cuts through the room before she even registers that she slapped him. "They murderedseven billion people."
She expects retaliation for daring to hit him, but he only watches her with an odd expression, halfway between curiosity and pity. "Your attachment is ridiculous. They weren't your people. You're nothing like them. They were a resource. A product. You're an Abrasax."
He invades her space with the same casual presumptuousness he displays in crushing billions of lives to prolong his own and that of his peers.
"You are a queen," he adds, and his hand cradles her cheek in a sickening approximation of a caress. His eyes are fixed on her, but they have that far-away look, and she knows he doesn't see her. He doesn't see her.
"I am not your mother."
Balem blinks, like he's shaking off a mirage, and his gaze clears. "I know. My mother wanted to die so badly. You're fighting so hard to live, even when the odds are stacked against you. You should be dead a dozen times over. And yet, here you are." There's wonder beneath the raspiness of his tone, like he admires her survival instinct. But even as he says the words, his hand is sliding down to her neck, fingers tightening against the tender skin until breathing becomes a struggle.
She grasps his wrist to pull his arm away, but his grip is like iron.
Then his lips are on hers, hard and unforgiving. A kiss like punishment, like loathing, sharp as a dagger and bitter like venom.
He stumbles backwards when she knees him in the groin. Jupiter wipes her mouth, unsurprised when her hand comes away bloodstained. "You need to make up your mind whether you want to kill me or fuck me."
"I already killed you once."
The smile on his lips is thin, without humor, and it tugs at his scar tissue. She wonders if he's deliberately invoking his mother's death to rile her up or if he's confusing them again. This time, she doesn't bother to set him right. There's only so many times she can tell him that she's not Seraphi without growing tired of talking in circles.
#
"Your Majesty," Mr Night calls her when he tells her that Balem kindly requests her company at dinner tonight, and it makes her skin crawl because it only reminds her of Caine, of everything she lost and will never have again.
"Your Majesty," the Aegis officer says when he regretfully informs her that they have no evidence that the House of Glycon is responsible for the incident that wiped out the population of Earth, but she's welcome to file a report for property damage.
Balem doesn't call her anything at all.
It's a relief, for a while. The less he talks – the less he addresses her – the better, and she supposes she should be glad that he's not calling her Mother again. But it's getting lonely out here in space, and sometimes all she wants is to hear her name from someone else's lips, even if it's someone she loathes.
#
Every night at dinner, she watches him drink expensive wine and treat his employees with mild, barely concealed contempt. He makes perfectly pleasant, empty small talk with her like he never tried to murder her, like he doesn't know she despises him and everything he stands for. Jupiter wonders if this is par for the course with the Abrasax family, this kind of passive-aggressive display of normalcy with contempt bubbling beneath the surface.
It makes her want to scream. She wants to rattle that cage, wants to tear that farce of civility apart.
She also wants revenge. Not on Balem; they're past that. He tried to kill her and used her family as a bargaining chip to tear Earth from her, she shot him and let him fall to his death. None of that matters, not when the very thing they fought about to begin with is gone. She wants the Glycons to pay, and she cannot do it on her own.
Putting her silver cutlery down with a clatter of metal, she stands and walks towards the far end of the table where he's sitting. His eyes follow her every step, and she thinks she can spot a twitch beneath his blank, nonchalant expression. Curiosity or suspicion, it's hard to tell.
Without a word passing between them, she slides into his lap, and there is a moment when he's frozen and something akin to panic flashes in his eyes. But his hands have already settled on her hips and she can feel him growing hard beneath her, so whatever reservations he might have about being in such an intimate position with a woman who looks like his mother, they clearly don't penetrate his subconscious.
Jupiter grinds down and his cock twitches against her ass.
"They need to die," she says, putting every ounce of Seraphi Abrasax's imperiousness into her tone. "I want them wiped out the way they wiped out the people on Earth."
He pushes up the long, shimmering skirt of her dress until the fabric pools around her waist like a lake filled with starlight. His hands are cold on her skin. "Are you asking me to commit murder for you?"
"Don't tell me you're having moral objections," she scoffs.
She reaches down and trails the path of fine hair beneath his belly button to the fastenings of his pants, working them open with surprisingly steady fingers. When she thought about doing this, she wasn't sure if she could go through with it, but there's something about the idea of making someone as powerful and narcissistic as Balem Abrasax bend to her will that sends a thrill running through her, filling the same void inside of her that having Caine call her Your Majesty did.
Her fingers dig into his shoulders as she sinks down on his cock. A broken little gasp tumbles from his lips and his hands tighten on her hips, leaving finger-shaped bruises. His fingers are long and slender, neatly manicured, devoid of calluses. She imagines that soft skin would feel amazing against her clit, and when she pulls one of his wrists away from her side and moves it down to her moist folds, he lets her direct him as she pleases.
At a flick of his fingertip, a spasm runs through her and she gasps. "Yes, right there."
He's completely silent as she rides him in slow, sinuous movements, but his eyes remain fixed on her face, heavy-lidded and brimming with emotion.
The embroidered fabric of the cloak on his shoulders rustles when she clenches her fingers in it. "Say my name."
Anger flashes over his face, come and gone quick as lightning, but she can still taste it on his lips when he surges forward to kiss her. She can taste the sweet spiciness of the wine and fruit they had for dinner on his tongue before she breaks away.
"Say my name," she orders again, harsher this time, moving faster against him.
"Jupiter," he rasps. It sounds like a curse.
She arches her back and comes, clenching around him until she feels him spilling inside of her.
#
She stands at Balem's side, watching through the command room's floor-to-ceiling window as the last of the Glycon ships explodes. Deadly fireworks, ghastly beautiful in their fury.
It feels good, the flare of righteous vengeance, but only for a minute. The satisfaction passes as quickly as the explosion dies down, and all that's left is the vast, hollow blackness of the universe.
"Was that what you wanted?" Balem asks.
Something about the question makes tears sting her eyes. "I wanted to live my life," she chokes out, angry at Balem for asking, at Seraphi for dragging her into this, at the Glycons, at the universe. "At home, with my family. I didn't want any of this."
Balem doesn't look at her. "I wanted my mother to love me."
I'm not your mother, and I don't love you, Jupiter thinks, but there's no point in telling him what he already knows.
#
With the House of Glycon gone, there's no reason for her to stick around.
Balem doesn't react kindly when she voices that thought. "Don't you dare leave me again," he hisses. There's a threat in his words, but his tone is like a little boy's, crying out for his mother because he's lonely and scared of the dark.
She could go. It might break him, worse than he's already been broken, but it would be nothing less than he deserves. He doesn't have anything left to threaten her with to keep her here. It's a double-edged blade: There's nothing left to use against her because she literally has nothing left.
She's halfway out of the room when he calls her back.
"Jupiter."
Her name, unprompted, freely given for once. His voice wavers. "Please." Wetness in his eyes and desperation on his face. She wants nothing more than to ignore his pleading and throw it back in his face. Take one step and another and keep walking.
But her home is in ashes, all the people she cared for are dust, and she's an Abrasax. There's nothing left for her but her genetic code, Seraphi's twisted, broken legacy.
It's the worst reason to stay.
It's as good a reason as any.
End.