VILA
Being President of the Galaxy is really not that bad, y'know.
Even if its only in a dream. Your dreams are good.
Here you are, sprawled on a throne which is made of solid - but oddly soft and squashy - gold, and covered with silver and red furs and velvet the colour of rainbows. Dressed in what looks like snakeskin, only softer than silk. In a room walled with amethysts and sapphires and blue diamonds, letting the sunlight through.
Your handpicked virgin attendants (three hundred this time, absolute beauties every one of them ) all dressed in the same soft, bright snakeskin uniforms, are feeding you Cyclops eyes in cream and wine sauce, sugar flowerflies, grapes and bleekberries and seven different wines. And another three hundred are bringing in the latest lot of gifts from your grateful, humble, loyal, rich galaxy... jewel-encrusted keypads, painted giant Jabberwocks that sing like sixteen Soolins in the shower, silver groundfliers with red velvet seating for twelve (you can take the best eleven virgins, you think), statues of every naked goddess in the twelve sectors (and that makes for a lot of goddesses), a mountain of kairopan and a lake of feldon crystals, plus priceless fruits like goldsimmon and silvaberries, and real coffee, and seventy-seven more different wines.
"And that is the last," the last virgin says (hey, she looks like Servalan - a soft, sweet seventeen-year-old Servalan. Damn, your dreams are good) as they put the last statue in front of you. It's a pink and gilded naked - flesh-eating lily. With diamond teeth. Personally, you prefer goddesses. "You now own everything in the galaxy, your Supremeness."
"Great, wonderful," you say dreamily. "Not bad for a Delta thief, eh?"
She smiles, still sweetly but there's something a little too - sharp - about her perfect teeth. You don't like that, it's something a little imperfect in your dreamworld. You shift on the not-quite-so-soft gold chair.
"But you're not a thief anymore, are you?" She says, and her voice sounds like an echo off the darkening sapphire walls. "You're the President."
"Once a thief always a thief," you say, wishing the painted Jabberwocks (which now sounds like sixty Soolins in the shower) would shut up for a while. "It's what I am - who I am."
"Who you are?" Several of the virgins - and hey, they all look like Servalan, not as soft, less sweet - are speaking now. Speaking all together, all echoing, and it's giving you a headache. (Why is it your good dreams won't stay good?) "But who are you?"
"I'm the President," you try for a little dignity, though it's something you're not good at, you've never needed it before. "And I'm a thief. I stole the Presidency, didn't I?"
And you remember (why the hell couldn't you remember before?) that you didn't steal it. You were given it. Like you've been given all this. Everything you ever wanted. Everything in the galaxy...
"How can you be a thief, when there's nothing to thieve?" A sour, spiny Servalan says, and you start to sweat. "If you own everything, you cannot steal from anyone. You can't be a thief anymore." And the thought makes you sick. Nothing to steal..?
You can't be a thief anymore.
Nothing, nowhere, never again?
You can't be a thief anymore.
But it's all you know how to... "So what are you," and the Servalans sound like a flock of Jabberwocks screeching at you, "who are you now?"
~oOo~
And you wake, shaking and breathless and about to scream.
Damn, your dreams are bad.