Like Lovers
Prologue: far/nearer
It is cold in the darkness of the wide cell and she is exhausted, legs curled up to her chest where she sits in the upward slanted corner, hiding her brown face from the various prisoners trapped in the same cell as she. The smell of defecation is strong and nauseating; her abdomen is cramped not just from her position, but she refuses to lose the shred of dignity she still retains by loosing her belt and crouching near the floor before the eyes of fifteen male aliens and the silent, faceless guard. She knows she could never live it down if he finds out, a different embarrassment than it would have been ten years ago. So she waits with the cramping and the stink and the bars of this cell she has been in once before, knowing he will come soon, not for the fifteen others who have offended him or his code in some form or another, but for her.
She hates the memories this place brings back, memories of being trapped in this cell by Gorm with the Boy she would die for, and he for her. Blue eyes with grey flecks and carefully styled brown hair hanging over one, with pouty lips almost always curved up in a grin and feminine eyelashes he swore he didn't have, a spectral form of a boy who changed from silly to dangerous over the course of ten years, a dark man. If she thinks about him, whether it be the creative child who befriended her at elementary school or the off-the-wall teenager brought to the Outer Dimension or this frightening overlord that was him, is him, will be him, she will not be strong when he comes for her and that she must be. Because no matter how corrupted he has become, no matter how much he hates Nepol and Euripides and Jens, he has always been lenient with her. It must not make her weak.
The pain in her abdomen is growing slowly and she grimaces, thankful, at least, that it is not time for her monthly discharge. She does not want to imagine that; the cell is unpleasant enough already. A shiver runs through her body, her nerves sparking at the coldness of the dungeons in direct contrast with the blinding heat of the surface. Now she regrets wearing a red shirt, sleeveless, wishing futilely that she had donned a sweater before leaving her bedchamber on T'rall, as if she would have known that several hours later she would be on Kek, freezing mid-cramp in a vile cage. Frowning, she tests the bars again, as she has done every five minutes for the past seven hours, and is once more frustrated that they are more solid than the ones Gorm constructed. But was it not her Boy that said all of Gorm's power had been derived from a fraction of his, stolen when he an infant? Groaning softly under her breath, she bends forward, a strip of skin on her lower back pressing against cold, wet stone.
The sound of a lame foot dragging across the floor grabs her attention and she lifts her head, dark eyes staring at a whiskered Larjonian. It is ragged in appearance, blue flesh torn in spots, causing it to look disheveled and sickly, something it may be. Looking at it now is hard; she has seen his forces exterminate this creature's home planet mercilessly. She had seen it from his side, captive, seen that he had flinched almost imperceptibly and gripped the arm of his arched chair, eyes darkening, and not for the first time she drifts back to that day and wonders if he can ever be redeemed.
"You're her," the Larjonian says simply, silver-gold eyes unreadable and constantly swirling intoxicatingly. She nods slowly, pulled back from her thoughts, and settles for locking eyes with it. A moment of silence is drawn out as it waits for something she cannot give, for what does it want? An apology, perhaps, she thinks, an apology for something I did not do. "Zane," it continues after a while and she becomes aware that the other prisoners are watching, "the one meant to save us all." There is no bitterness in its lilting voice, but a sympathy and understanding that confuses her. "It is difficult," the voice tilts up like the honeyed song of a soprano, "fighting an enemy that is not."
And suddenly she understand, her throat closing convulsively. "Yes," she manages to squeeze out, the pain in her abdomen forgotten. "It hurts like hell." The urge to let every word, every emotion, every longing slip past her lips to this being that sees the misery burning in her eyes, it nearly overpowers the unconscious wall built up to protect her from revealing things that should be hidden. She needs to rage, to lash out, screaming and crying for, against, with, the whimsical young man that has engrained himself into her heart and soul. But the wall is too strong, fortified over the years so that she is unable to open the gate to anybody other than him. She stays quiet and a scabbed hand of pale blue, whitened by bleeding, touches her shoulder gently, hovering above it and barely touching her bare skin. "I'm sorry," she whispers, unsure of whom she is apologizing to. It nods and squeezes her shoulder, hobbling back to its spot in the opposite corner, near the bars that she tests absently once more. She expected anger, not wholly deserved, and this acceptance is infinitely kinder than anything she had imagined. Her eyes flit to a wall across the thin strip of a walkway between cells, tracing lines uniting the immovable grey bricks and ignoring the lonely hurt that has broken free of the carefully constructed pen that has held it captive for ten years. Swelling up, it swamps over and fills her bones with an ache, drowning her in a thousand what-ifs, what-should-have-beens, and why-didn'ts.
Just for a few seconds, or perhaps it was for a few minutes, she becomes a twelve-year old tomboy with a black eye from fighting a bully. It had hurt tremendously for a week, swollen and a nasty shade of purple, but she didn't care because he had come into the fight, swinging his arms like Don Quixote's windmill, vicious and snarling the second she had been punched in the face. His lip, she remembers, was split and he had somehow managed to break his thumb. "I don't have to do homework!" he cried joyfully that long ago day, flaunting his cast at her with his usual cocky grin, and, in that moment, she had hit the greatest stage of puberty. Suddenly, her best friend was no longer just that: he was a boy who willingly was 'trashed,' as he put it, for her. He was the Great Crush.
She is slightly startled at finding she is in the cell, pulling herself out of the memories for something she cannot place. It must be unimportant, she decides, seeing nothing that strikes her as odd, until her eyes catches the guard's rigid stance; it is still and stiffly straight, as if a rod has been thrust up its back, along its spine. He is finally coming and she smiles grimly, instinctively aware of the horrible anticipation knotting in her stomach. A wave of resentment follows; she hates him right now, for killing her dream of a blue house with a white picket fence holding a barking Labrador in, for stealing the secret hope of a small wedding and two children with light skin and ink eyes, for breaking every wish and fantasy and thought. As the sound of footfalls echo down the hallway, the resentment dies quietly and leaves her to wait alone in a cell of strangers, feeling as if she is naked and exposed. Positioning her hands on the wall behind her, she uses it to lever herself up onto her feet, taking a strong stand and letting her arms fall by her sides, curling black hair clinging to her cheeks, shorter than it was once and merely touching her shoulder blades. She walks slowly to the door built from bars, standing casually there with her eyes fixed on the light shadows of the entrance. She is not disappointed.
He is alone when he arrives, striding purposefully past the guard and to the other side of the cell door. His blue eyes connect with her ebon, weaving the colors together, and the silence is engulfing, pulling her soul into his and his into hers. He unlocks the door with a miniscule twitch of a finer and, in the corner of her eye, she sees one or two aliens stumble back, surprised, as the doors swing open. She stills her lips from turning up; she, after all, is used to the peculiarities of the glinch power and, even more so, the oddities of his personality. A smile lights up his face and he holds his clean peach hand out for her dirtied brown hand, which she gives silently. Led soundlessly from the cell, she hears the door creak shut and lock itself as she follows him, her arm crooked into his.
He is taller that her by a foot or so, though it does not surprise her much, considering the genetics of her family are a blend of Asian and Native American, and -- she tilts her head to one side and marks up, in her mind, that she really does not know his family's genetic history. In any case, she feels small standing near him and more than a little angry over the fact. He should be the one feeling small; he is the murderer, the betrayer, the tyrant who should have been king. She is merely the woman who must destroy his power.
"I've missed you," he says almost shyly, glancing over his shoulder down at her. Her chest tightens painfully at the lonely look in his ocean blue eyes, and immediately hates herself for caring. His smile is hesitant, cautious, and she feels a twinge of connection with him, a surge of friendliness that demands she brush an errant brunette bang from his eyes. But she does not: she is strong. His smile freezes and slowly fades, his eyes hardening as he returns his gaze to the hallway, dropping her arm and quickening his pace. "Right," he states darkly.
She watches him, her own pace slowing down. Thoughtfully, she takes a few steps backwards, moving to the right; her body slams into an invisible wall and she snaps her face forward to glare at him. He looks at her and smirks, the blue sleeves of his jerkin fluttering slightly.
"Don't," he commands in a subtle, amused voice.
She walks swiftly, brushing past him, and tosses carelessly over her shoulder, "I seem to remember a time when you would never force me to do anything." Her tone is icy and more than a little cruel. There is another long silence with only the sounds of their feet falling against tiled stone breaking it. She does not understand how she feels about the lack of response, instead remaining voiceless in the game of waiting for the other to speak. It is a game birthed a few years ago, amidst a rebellion on Shuah that had ultimately failed, and she has never been comfortable with it. He passes by her, ignoring her as well as she is his silence.
"I saw my mother last month," he finally begins, his voice echoing gently down the dank corridor. "I assume what she told me she told you years ago." They stop walking and look at each other, both faces impassive. 'That I was never the one meant to save Galidor." She nods, now, though it is a careful, controlled movement designed to indicate her awareness of the knowledge and nothing more. His voice is distant, as if the thought had never occurred to him before his mother appeared to him. "What she said made me think," he begins walking and she follows automatically, turning left or right where it is necessary, "do we ever have control over our fates? And, yeah, the question's been done to death, but still. Was I supposed to have those dreams so you would be brought to the Outer Dimension?" His low alto is tilting, rising and falling lightly with the accenting of each word. "And then, I replaced Gorm…so you would grow stronger?" She hears him speaking but her mind is gone, brought back to the day he was first corrupted; he had killed Gorm, slaughtered him uncaringly with the eerie smile twisting his features into a foreign mask.
She does what her mind swears is just, ignoring her heart. She punches him square in the jaw, splitting two knuckles on her chapped hand, blood trickling along his chin from a gash in his lip and betwixt her knuckles into the lines of her calloused palm. His eyebrows are arched in surprise and his tongue flicks out to catch the trail of blood, crimson against his already full lower lip. Her breathing is heavy and angry, his shallow and startled. "How do you like it?" she demands harshly, her eyes narrowed as they stare at one another. He licks his lip again, not fully understanding until he remembers.
"You're still pissed about that," he says wonderingly, fingering his bloody lower lip and staring at her with his eyebrows merging together. "I destroy entire worlds, enslave races, systematically annihilate cultures," his voice grows in pitch steadily, "and you care more about the one time I hit you?" He is incredulous, beautiful blue eyes glowing with some odd fury. "Ten years," he hisses, sucking his lip and wiping the blood off of his chin. "Ten years since I hit you." Her face is stony while she massages her bleeding hand. "Ten goddamn years, Allegra!"
Allegra's eyes tear away from his and Nicholas lets a strangled noise rip forth from his throat. "I'll take you to your room," he tells her in a tight voice. "Follow me and don't stray." She is pushed forward by the shrinking wall, momentarily thrown off balance.
The droplets of garnet blood spilled on the floor slowly slide toward one another, pulled by gravity to the lowest point in the hallway until they become one small puddle of dark red.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
now we've traveled far
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Allegra's hand flew up to her jaw and she gaped, through the tears slipping down her cheeks, at the form of Nick's raised fist. Oh God, she realized distantly, he actually hit me. Nick stepped over her legs, over her body sprawled across the hard metal floor, and approached Gorm, still wearing that ridiculous chest piece he no doubt had thought similar to those of his idolized comic book superheroes. He was going to kill Gorm, she had failed at trying to stop him peacefully, some object had to be nearby that wasn't bolted to the floor, don't let Nick kill Gorm, damnit I've seen this movie! The hero is supposed to let the villain live, saving his humanity, doing the right thing from every angle of perspective. As her hand closed around a metal cylinder knocked free by Nick earlier, she knew, in her clenching stomach, that she was too late.
She turned her head to one side, eyes latching onto the cape-obscured figures and ears catching the muted cry of Gorm's surprise as a lance of glinch energy barreled through his chest. A fine spray of crimson spurted into the air and Nick stepped back, his face a frightening calmness, discarding the chest piece by pulling it over his head. Allegra dropped the pipe and registered shock at the fact that the tears doubled, stinging her face with their salty heat. She stumbled to her feet and ran gracelessly from the control room, her back to his cries for her to stat, praying that he wouldn't hurt her again. The image of Gorm falling to the floor, a ragged bleeding hole in his chest, burned itself into her brain and she ran faster, her head growing heavier with each step. Slowing down, she touched the back of her head gingerly and jerked her fingers away in alarm, bringing her hand to her face and staring at the bright, sticky wetness coloring the lengths of her fingers and thumb. Falling when Nick had struck her, she must have smashed her head along something jagged. Allegra, focused on the blood staining her hand, heard the sound of him following her, and, wearily, began running aimlessly once more.
A hundred corridors, twisting and turning incomprehensibly, all cold and unwelcoming as she stumbled along their confusing paths, hoping that, through some miracle, she would find the exit, and nearly simultaneously, inexplicably, she nearly fell out of the prison into the sweltering heat of the Kek deserts. The sand exploded up, a storm screaming about the surface, granules sticking to the back of her head, stinging and burning. Never once did she question why she was running from the closest friend she had, the boy who was, in a sense, her other half: he had struck her and did not stop to see if she was all right; he killed a man without a care, without flinching. A tiny part of her protested, saying he had done it all for her, had risked to death to save her, had struck her down so as to vanquish the enemy that the enemy might not vanquish her. None of it made sense, whirling around her like the orange sands.
And as she stumbled over the dunes and the rocks, crumbling to her knees before the Egg, as Nepol pulled her in and she ordered the door to be closed, as they asked where Nick was and she screamed some unknown sentence they obeyed, Allegra Zane felt her heart break.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
but are we any nearer
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
//end prologue//
||Notes for prologue: If the prologue seems confusing to you, I apologize. Most things will be explained through the course of the fanfiction and you simply need to stick around for it. As for the change in tenses, the first part (ending with the first lyric) is set in the 'now' of the fanfic, the present, whereas the second part (beginning with the first lyric and ending with the second) is set in the past. As you hopefully derived from the summary, this is set with the premise of 'what if Nick had struck Allegra and killed Gorm?' I think it might be beneficial if you have seen the episodes I have in mind.||
Prologue: far/nearer
It is cold in the darkness of the wide cell and she is exhausted, legs curled up to her chest where she sits in the upward slanted corner, hiding her brown face from the various prisoners trapped in the same cell as she. The smell of defecation is strong and nauseating; her abdomen is cramped not just from her position, but she refuses to lose the shred of dignity she still retains by loosing her belt and crouching near the floor before the eyes of fifteen male aliens and the silent, faceless guard. She knows she could never live it down if he finds out, a different embarrassment than it would have been ten years ago. So she waits with the cramping and the stink and the bars of this cell she has been in once before, knowing he will come soon, not for the fifteen others who have offended him or his code in some form or another, but for her.
She hates the memories this place brings back, memories of being trapped in this cell by Gorm with the Boy she would die for, and he for her. Blue eyes with grey flecks and carefully styled brown hair hanging over one, with pouty lips almost always curved up in a grin and feminine eyelashes he swore he didn't have, a spectral form of a boy who changed from silly to dangerous over the course of ten years, a dark man. If she thinks about him, whether it be the creative child who befriended her at elementary school or the off-the-wall teenager brought to the Outer Dimension or this frightening overlord that was him, is him, will be him, she will not be strong when he comes for her and that she must be. Because no matter how corrupted he has become, no matter how much he hates Nepol and Euripides and Jens, he has always been lenient with her. It must not make her weak.
The pain in her abdomen is growing slowly and she grimaces, thankful, at least, that it is not time for her monthly discharge. She does not want to imagine that; the cell is unpleasant enough already. A shiver runs through her body, her nerves sparking at the coldness of the dungeons in direct contrast with the blinding heat of the surface. Now she regrets wearing a red shirt, sleeveless, wishing futilely that she had donned a sweater before leaving her bedchamber on T'rall, as if she would have known that several hours later she would be on Kek, freezing mid-cramp in a vile cage. Frowning, she tests the bars again, as she has done every five minutes for the past seven hours, and is once more frustrated that they are more solid than the ones Gorm constructed. But was it not her Boy that said all of Gorm's power had been derived from a fraction of his, stolen when he an infant? Groaning softly under her breath, she bends forward, a strip of skin on her lower back pressing against cold, wet stone.
The sound of a lame foot dragging across the floor grabs her attention and she lifts her head, dark eyes staring at a whiskered Larjonian. It is ragged in appearance, blue flesh torn in spots, causing it to look disheveled and sickly, something it may be. Looking at it now is hard; she has seen his forces exterminate this creature's home planet mercilessly. She had seen it from his side, captive, seen that he had flinched almost imperceptibly and gripped the arm of his arched chair, eyes darkening, and not for the first time she drifts back to that day and wonders if he can ever be redeemed.
"You're her," the Larjonian says simply, silver-gold eyes unreadable and constantly swirling intoxicatingly. She nods slowly, pulled back from her thoughts, and settles for locking eyes with it. A moment of silence is drawn out as it waits for something she cannot give, for what does it want? An apology, perhaps, she thinks, an apology for something I did not do. "Zane," it continues after a while and she becomes aware that the other prisoners are watching, "the one meant to save us all." There is no bitterness in its lilting voice, but a sympathy and understanding that confuses her. "It is difficult," the voice tilts up like the honeyed song of a soprano, "fighting an enemy that is not."
And suddenly she understand, her throat closing convulsively. "Yes," she manages to squeeze out, the pain in her abdomen forgotten. "It hurts like hell." The urge to let every word, every emotion, every longing slip past her lips to this being that sees the misery burning in her eyes, it nearly overpowers the unconscious wall built up to protect her from revealing things that should be hidden. She needs to rage, to lash out, screaming and crying for, against, with, the whimsical young man that has engrained himself into her heart and soul. But the wall is too strong, fortified over the years so that she is unable to open the gate to anybody other than him. She stays quiet and a scabbed hand of pale blue, whitened by bleeding, touches her shoulder gently, hovering above it and barely touching her bare skin. "I'm sorry," she whispers, unsure of whom she is apologizing to. It nods and squeezes her shoulder, hobbling back to its spot in the opposite corner, near the bars that she tests absently once more. She expected anger, not wholly deserved, and this acceptance is infinitely kinder than anything she had imagined. Her eyes flit to a wall across the thin strip of a walkway between cells, tracing lines uniting the immovable grey bricks and ignoring the lonely hurt that has broken free of the carefully constructed pen that has held it captive for ten years. Swelling up, it swamps over and fills her bones with an ache, drowning her in a thousand what-ifs, what-should-have-beens, and why-didn'ts.
Just for a few seconds, or perhaps it was for a few minutes, she becomes a twelve-year old tomboy with a black eye from fighting a bully. It had hurt tremendously for a week, swollen and a nasty shade of purple, but she didn't care because he had come into the fight, swinging his arms like Don Quixote's windmill, vicious and snarling the second she had been punched in the face. His lip, she remembers, was split and he had somehow managed to break his thumb. "I don't have to do homework!" he cried joyfully that long ago day, flaunting his cast at her with his usual cocky grin, and, in that moment, she had hit the greatest stage of puberty. Suddenly, her best friend was no longer just that: he was a boy who willingly was 'trashed,' as he put it, for her. He was the Great Crush.
She is slightly startled at finding she is in the cell, pulling herself out of the memories for something she cannot place. It must be unimportant, she decides, seeing nothing that strikes her as odd, until her eyes catches the guard's rigid stance; it is still and stiffly straight, as if a rod has been thrust up its back, along its spine. He is finally coming and she smiles grimly, instinctively aware of the horrible anticipation knotting in her stomach. A wave of resentment follows; she hates him right now, for killing her dream of a blue house with a white picket fence holding a barking Labrador in, for stealing the secret hope of a small wedding and two children with light skin and ink eyes, for breaking every wish and fantasy and thought. As the sound of footfalls echo down the hallway, the resentment dies quietly and leaves her to wait alone in a cell of strangers, feeling as if she is naked and exposed. Positioning her hands on the wall behind her, she uses it to lever herself up onto her feet, taking a strong stand and letting her arms fall by her sides, curling black hair clinging to her cheeks, shorter than it was once and merely touching her shoulder blades. She walks slowly to the door built from bars, standing casually there with her eyes fixed on the light shadows of the entrance. She is not disappointed.
He is alone when he arrives, striding purposefully past the guard and to the other side of the cell door. His blue eyes connect with her ebon, weaving the colors together, and the silence is engulfing, pulling her soul into his and his into hers. He unlocks the door with a miniscule twitch of a finer and, in the corner of her eye, she sees one or two aliens stumble back, surprised, as the doors swing open. She stills her lips from turning up; she, after all, is used to the peculiarities of the glinch power and, even more so, the oddities of his personality. A smile lights up his face and he holds his clean peach hand out for her dirtied brown hand, which she gives silently. Led soundlessly from the cell, she hears the door creak shut and lock itself as she follows him, her arm crooked into his.
He is taller that her by a foot or so, though it does not surprise her much, considering the genetics of her family are a blend of Asian and Native American, and -- she tilts her head to one side and marks up, in her mind, that she really does not know his family's genetic history. In any case, she feels small standing near him and more than a little angry over the fact. He should be the one feeling small; he is the murderer, the betrayer, the tyrant who should have been king. She is merely the woman who must destroy his power.
"I've missed you," he says almost shyly, glancing over his shoulder down at her. Her chest tightens painfully at the lonely look in his ocean blue eyes, and immediately hates herself for caring. His smile is hesitant, cautious, and she feels a twinge of connection with him, a surge of friendliness that demands she brush an errant brunette bang from his eyes. But she does not: she is strong. His smile freezes and slowly fades, his eyes hardening as he returns his gaze to the hallway, dropping her arm and quickening his pace. "Right," he states darkly.
She watches him, her own pace slowing down. Thoughtfully, she takes a few steps backwards, moving to the right; her body slams into an invisible wall and she snaps her face forward to glare at him. He looks at her and smirks, the blue sleeves of his jerkin fluttering slightly.
"Don't," he commands in a subtle, amused voice.
She walks swiftly, brushing past him, and tosses carelessly over her shoulder, "I seem to remember a time when you would never force me to do anything." Her tone is icy and more than a little cruel. There is another long silence with only the sounds of their feet falling against tiled stone breaking it. She does not understand how she feels about the lack of response, instead remaining voiceless in the game of waiting for the other to speak. It is a game birthed a few years ago, amidst a rebellion on Shuah that had ultimately failed, and she has never been comfortable with it. He passes by her, ignoring her as well as she is his silence.
"I saw my mother last month," he finally begins, his voice echoing gently down the dank corridor. "I assume what she told me she told you years ago." They stop walking and look at each other, both faces impassive. 'That I was never the one meant to save Galidor." She nods, now, though it is a careful, controlled movement designed to indicate her awareness of the knowledge and nothing more. His voice is distant, as if the thought had never occurred to him before his mother appeared to him. "What she said made me think," he begins walking and she follows automatically, turning left or right where it is necessary, "do we ever have control over our fates? And, yeah, the question's been done to death, but still. Was I supposed to have those dreams so you would be brought to the Outer Dimension?" His low alto is tilting, rising and falling lightly with the accenting of each word. "And then, I replaced Gorm…so you would grow stronger?" She hears him speaking but her mind is gone, brought back to the day he was first corrupted; he had killed Gorm, slaughtered him uncaringly with the eerie smile twisting his features into a foreign mask.
She does what her mind swears is just, ignoring her heart. She punches him square in the jaw, splitting two knuckles on her chapped hand, blood trickling along his chin from a gash in his lip and betwixt her knuckles into the lines of her calloused palm. His eyebrows are arched in surprise and his tongue flicks out to catch the trail of blood, crimson against his already full lower lip. Her breathing is heavy and angry, his shallow and startled. "How do you like it?" she demands harshly, her eyes narrowed as they stare at one another. He licks his lip again, not fully understanding until he remembers.
"You're still pissed about that," he says wonderingly, fingering his bloody lower lip and staring at her with his eyebrows merging together. "I destroy entire worlds, enslave races, systematically annihilate cultures," his voice grows in pitch steadily, "and you care more about the one time I hit you?" He is incredulous, beautiful blue eyes glowing with some odd fury. "Ten years," he hisses, sucking his lip and wiping the blood off of his chin. "Ten years since I hit you." Her face is stony while she massages her bleeding hand. "Ten goddamn years, Allegra!"
Allegra's eyes tear away from his and Nicholas lets a strangled noise rip forth from his throat. "I'll take you to your room," he tells her in a tight voice. "Follow me and don't stray." She is pushed forward by the shrinking wall, momentarily thrown off balance.
The droplets of garnet blood spilled on the floor slowly slide toward one another, pulled by gravity to the lowest point in the hallway until they become one small puddle of dark red.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
now we've traveled far
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Allegra's hand flew up to her jaw and she gaped, through the tears slipping down her cheeks, at the form of Nick's raised fist. Oh God, she realized distantly, he actually hit me. Nick stepped over her legs, over her body sprawled across the hard metal floor, and approached Gorm, still wearing that ridiculous chest piece he no doubt had thought similar to those of his idolized comic book superheroes. He was going to kill Gorm, she had failed at trying to stop him peacefully, some object had to be nearby that wasn't bolted to the floor, don't let Nick kill Gorm, damnit I've seen this movie! The hero is supposed to let the villain live, saving his humanity, doing the right thing from every angle of perspective. As her hand closed around a metal cylinder knocked free by Nick earlier, she knew, in her clenching stomach, that she was too late.
She turned her head to one side, eyes latching onto the cape-obscured figures and ears catching the muted cry of Gorm's surprise as a lance of glinch energy barreled through his chest. A fine spray of crimson spurted into the air and Nick stepped back, his face a frightening calmness, discarding the chest piece by pulling it over his head. Allegra dropped the pipe and registered shock at the fact that the tears doubled, stinging her face with their salty heat. She stumbled to her feet and ran gracelessly from the control room, her back to his cries for her to stat, praying that he wouldn't hurt her again. The image of Gorm falling to the floor, a ragged bleeding hole in his chest, burned itself into her brain and she ran faster, her head growing heavier with each step. Slowing down, she touched the back of her head gingerly and jerked her fingers away in alarm, bringing her hand to her face and staring at the bright, sticky wetness coloring the lengths of her fingers and thumb. Falling when Nick had struck her, she must have smashed her head along something jagged. Allegra, focused on the blood staining her hand, heard the sound of him following her, and, wearily, began running aimlessly once more.
A hundred corridors, twisting and turning incomprehensibly, all cold and unwelcoming as she stumbled along their confusing paths, hoping that, through some miracle, she would find the exit, and nearly simultaneously, inexplicably, she nearly fell out of the prison into the sweltering heat of the Kek deserts. The sand exploded up, a storm screaming about the surface, granules sticking to the back of her head, stinging and burning. Never once did she question why she was running from the closest friend she had, the boy who was, in a sense, her other half: he had struck her and did not stop to see if she was all right; he killed a man without a care, without flinching. A tiny part of her protested, saying he had done it all for her, had risked to death to save her, had struck her down so as to vanquish the enemy that the enemy might not vanquish her. None of it made sense, whirling around her like the orange sands.
And as she stumbled over the dunes and the rocks, crumbling to her knees before the Egg, as Nepol pulled her in and she ordered the door to be closed, as they asked where Nick was and she screamed some unknown sentence they obeyed, Allegra Zane felt her heart break.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
but are we any nearer
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
//end prologue//
||Notes for prologue: If the prologue seems confusing to you, I apologize. Most things will be explained through the course of the fanfiction and you simply need to stick around for it. As for the change in tenses, the first part (ending with the first lyric) is set in the 'now' of the fanfic, the present, whereas the second part (beginning with the first lyric and ending with the second) is set in the past. As you hopefully derived from the summary, this is set with the premise of 'what if Nick had struck Allegra and killed Gorm?' I think it might be beneficial if you have seen the episodes I have in mind.||