"G… Gregg? What's the mater, honey, don't you remember me?" The words sound hollow. I didn't even recognize the voice. It was like a foreigner was speaking from within me, squeaking my lungs and throat into an unintelligible form.
He looks back down at the old ship he'd been busy breaking the seats out of. "Why did you come here?"
"To bring you home… it's okay if you're not a soldier! I just want to be with you!" I cry, throwing myself forward and burying myself in his chest.
He recoils like someone had just attacked him with some kind of contagion, not looking at my face. "You've got to be kidding, right? A failed soldier is no good at all, and shouldn't even be allowed to live. It's only by the grace of the Empire that I wasn't execu…"
"STOP IT! I don't believe that shit, and I don't believe that you do either!" The words are falling out of my mouth as fast as my tears fall from my eyes, sounding more like words Willow would use than anything I knew I was capable of saying. "It doesn't matter to me if you're not a top-class number one ranked soldier. I didn't fall in love with you because of your rank. I fell in love with you because of you."
He slams down the pick-ax, spinning around with nothing but coldness shining in the eyes I used to love to see looking down at me from the darkness. "Don't you get it, you stupid twit? I only needed you to make myself look good to my superiors." He turns his back on me. "Now that everything I had hoped for is gone, I don't need you. You should just… leave. Leave me alone." He rubs his arms, shivering.
"Gregg…" All the muscle tone leaves my body and I collapse to my knees in a half layer of grime and filth. "I know you don't mean that… you're just depressed about failing your test… I don't care about your test… please come back to me… please come back…"
His back still turned to my face, he throws the pick-ax over his shoulder and trudges off with the rest of the prisoners, never looking back.
The tears won't come. No matter how long I thought about it afterwards, the tears never came. There are things in this world that shatter the soul to the point where tears would mean nothing, not even the slightest bit of comfort to your mourning. The death of a child, losing one's home and treasured possessions to fire, standing among corpses on a battle field… those are all moments beyond tears. But for someone whose life scope is as small as mine, this was one of those moments.
Oh, can't anybody see, we've got a war to fight. Never found our way, regardless of what they say. How can it feel this wrong? From this moment, how can it feel this wrong?
"Orig… Orig…" Willow puts a gloved hand gently on mine. "Can you walk?"
I don't have to try to know the answer to that, as I shake my head no, my palms pressed so hard into my closed eyes that white lights dance before my vision.
"Try to get up. We should get out of here before dark… Orig… Please…"
My body is not mine to control any more. I shudder as I try to shake my head no. I would have blown right over at the slightest wind had Willow not been kneeling beside me, her strong arms around my shoulders.
Hesitantly, like a clumsy man handling fine china, she puts her arms around me. Her long limbs wrap beneath my arms, her chin resting on my shoulder. Her long, split antennae brush across my face for a moment when the cold wind passes us. Instinctively and against my will, my arms go around her and clutch aimlessly at her back. She's so warm, so very warm…
Storm… in the morning light, I feel, no more can I say, frozen to myself. I got nobody on my side, and surely that ain't right. And surely, that ain't right.
"I'm sorry… I never would have let you get involved with him if I'd known…"
"Do you think… even if you had known… I would have let you stop me?"
Her body shakes slightly, in what could almost be a laugh cut down early by depression. "No. No. You're too stubborn to let me do that, which is one of the reasons why I like you so much." She leans back, taking my chin in her right hand and raising my eyes to meet hers. "Come on, kid… there's no reason for us to stay here."
Oh, can't anybody see, we've got a war to fight? Never found our way, regardless of what they say. How can it feel this wrong, from this moment? How can it feel this wrong?
She stands up, dragging me to my feet and hiking me up onto her back. My arms wrap around her neck as she takes my legs in her hands and brings them up. "Hold on tight, okay? I don't want to drop you on anything sharp."
I nod and bury my face in her back, right above her identification pack. The pack hums faintly, a sound most Irkens never get close enough to one another to notice. It's almost like the wings of a very tiny hummingbird.
Winding our way back across an entire planet dedicated to the excesses of war, it suddenly dawns on me that perhaps, there are things bigger than my own heart ache. But, I don't want to think about that at the moment. I just want to wallow in my own self-pity. I know it's not the patriotic thing to do. I know it's not the right thing to do for the good of the entire Empire. But it's what I want to do, and damn it, can't it be about me for once in my life?
Oh can't anybody see, we've got a war to fight. Never found our way, regardless of what they say. How can it feel this wrong, from this moment, how can it feel this wrong?
Sound asleep in the back of the ship is how Willow leaves me, all my energy having left my body through my eyes and trickled down my skin in invisible rivers. Moving as silently as a high-heeled ghost of a woman possibly can, she sets herself down in front of the control panel. She resists the urge to slam her fists into the ship walls, knowing it will wake me and I need the sleep.
"Damn you, Raine," she weeps into the silence. "Why did you make me bring her here? It would have been just as good to leave him as the dead! She wouldn't have to hurt like we do!"
The blue glow coming off the control panel lights her skin an odd turquoise as her red eyes fail to focus on anything but the incoming night overhead. "Damn you… you knew… damn you…"
Unwilling to admit that she might have perhaps wanted Gregg to turn out that way, just to prove herself right, she buries her face in her arms and sleeps.
In her dreams, she is young again. Very young, barely a smeet hiding behind her mother's legs. The mother doesn't even seem to notice the hapless smeet resting behind her as she stretches, nearly kicking the infant in the head. The smeet squeaks and falls over backwards, then giggles at the novelty of being able to see the ceiling so easily.
"This is your cousin," he's introduced. A petulant young Irken with dark red eyes, of relatively short and thick stature, with arms too long for his body comes into the room. "He lost his parents in the big fire. He's come to live with us now. He'll be like your brother. Yes, we'll call him your brother…" Her mother's eyes are full of stars.
They had always wanted a boy.
Fast-forward a good ten, fifteen years down the road. She always forgets how long in her dreams. The little forgotten child, poor Whisper, the given name that she rejected and left behind many years ago with the rest of her past, sits on a swing by herself. She's in her formidable teen years, and has two parents who will theoretically love and guide her through them.
But they don't love her. They love their adopted "son." They love their son so much, what's the purpose in even noticing they have a daughter? No, there is no point…
Her brother, she's forgotten his name now with time, yet he meant so much to her that's a silly thing for her to forget. Perhaps she remembers it when she's awake, but she'd never admit that. He wraps his arms around her and hugs her close to his chest. He smells vaguely of dust.
"Did momma hit you again?"
She nods into his chest as he strokes her antennae, her small and not yet split antennae. "You shouldn't have been in the kitchen when she was trying to cook something. You know she blames you for anything that goes wrong in the kitchen."
She nods again, relishing his gentle touch on her back. "Sister, you're not a curse. It cuts me to hear her say that to you… it's not your fault you're their only child."
"What about you?"
"You know I don't really belong in this family…" his fingers trace slowly along the contours of her face. "Sister, I want to give you things that will make you happy… you just have to do a few little favors for me, okay?"
She swallows deep in her throat, but she trusts him. "What kind of favors?"
"I'll show you. You'll like them," he says, guiding her by hand. She can't remember where he first took her, only that the loft in the family barn would become their retreat for later. It was probably somewhere off in the woods. At that time, he was still worried about being caught.
Out in the depths of the woods, once he was certain he wouldn't be found, he lays his young sister down in the leaves. She trembles once or twice under his touch, but she trusts him. He's the only one in the family that gets between the flat of their mother's hand and her skin.
In her dreams, he's always gentle as he strips her down and pushes himself inside her, tearing not-quite-yet-developed body parts. She bites her own antennae to still her screams, as he's promised to buy her those new antennae clips she'd been admiring that mother and father say are too expensive. But all the other girls have them… it makes her feel odd, like an outsider, to simply have to stare at them through a glass window.
Her body and her antennae left torn and bleeding, her brother cleans her as best he can with leaves, and begs her not to tell their parents. She's crying, but she's convinced it's from joy. To be able to do something so adult, when she's so young, with the brother who means so much to her… the sensation is the world to her.
Years pass… three very, very lucky years pass, and for once the little outsider has the things she needs to fit in. Sharing an "adult" secret with her brother gives her confidence, which improves her looks and her posture from moderate to desirable. Something about her glows in a way the other girls can't match. In her dreams, she calls it experience.
Her material needs are met by her brother, as presents in return for sharing his secret. She doesn't tell him that she'd share the secret for free; he's her only means of getting the material things she feels she needs to fit in.
And then the luck comes crashing down. She's ill, she's vomiting, she can hardly get up in the morning, but these parts she cares to skip over in her dreams. She's only taken to the doctor after she collapses on the floor of the gym; her parents refused to take her. The doctor's grim diagnosis: the small female is pregnant.
Until they hear it from his own mouth, they refuse to believe that her precious cousin-brother, the favored son, could be responsible. They blame her for it, the call her a whore, they accuse her of seducing her "innocent" brother. In her dreams, it's a clear night when she runs away from home, burn marks crossing her face. In reality, it was such a muggy hot night that she could hardly move, let alone run. The only reason she got away at all was because no one pursued her.
The eggs, which mean the world to her, are laid in the bathroom of a home for troubled girls. She has them there because she'd overheard one of the teachers planning to let the nursing students in a nearby training program deliver the eggs for practice. The idea of baring her body for an entire class of students humiliates her to the point where she nearly bleeds to death on a cold tile floor as the alternative.
Sometimes she wonders what became of those eggs, but her dreams are neither the time nor the place for that kind of musing. Dreams are too short for that. By that time, the dream has already moved on to a young girl, wearing a yellow standard-issue sundress, bouncing along in a rough ship beside a sixty-something male that she hardly knows.
She's been hired to work as help around his mansion that summer. All her possessions fit in a cardboard suitcase, for if she left them behind while she went off for the summer the other girls would surely steal them.
"Young one," he says, "You are the luckiest girl of your class, even if you don't know it." With that, he stops and provides her with two new leather suitcases, and all the fineries and toiletries necessary to fill them. She is confused, she remembers thinking that he must surely intend to sleep with her. Why else would anyone buy her such lavish gifts?
"I want you to be the woman to marry my son," he says, putting his aged wrinkled hands around hers. "My wife, his mother, keeps him a virtual prisoner in his room. He's never seen a girl as lovely as you. Just think, if you fall in love with him, you'll never have to starve again." His eyes are bright, and suddenly for one bright moment, her future seems just as bright. She doesn't care if his son is the most horrible cripple ever. To be warm and fed is all she wants…
Standing on the front lawn, looking up at the window to what the man has pointed out as his son's room, she sees the flash of a camera going off. She blinks; even in her dreams the man didn't see it.
To her surprise, the boy is nice looking, if a bit pale from being confined to his bed. His mother tells him lies about his legs, tells him they don't work, tells him he's too sick to go outside and play with the other kids. She tells him she doesn't believe that nonsense, and she smuggles him outside when his mother is away at rich tea parties.
They careen around the mansion, rolling his wheelchair down hills at dangerously high speeds. They spook the livestock and the other servants. But the servants don't mind being scared… they've never seen young master Raine so happy in all his weak existence.
He takes pictures of her, sometimes odd pictures, but she doesn't mind. It's like a game to her. She stays on guard and manages to thwack him when he approaches her with his camera. If she loses her guard, he manages to sneak up and take a shot of her panties. She doesn't really mind all that much, compared to her brother's betrayal of her body this is clean, innocent fun.
He asks her to marry him as she's getting ready to get back on the convoy back to her school. She feels guilty accepting. He doesn't even know her real name. He only knows her as Willow, the orphaned daughter of two Invaders, the identity his father created for her to make her acceptable to Raine's overbearing mother. To tell the truth, she no longer feels like Whisper. Whisper is no more than a shell that had been hiding Willow all those years.
But as the next year passes, the personality she calls Willow becomes a deadly poison in her veins. Willow doesn't want to marry Raine and simply be warm and happy. Willow doesn't care if she freezes, so long as she's free. Whisper's priority was safety. Willow's priority is freedom.
But she goes through with the marriage to Raine anyway, even if she does it without smiling. She feels obligated to marry him, even though she's certain in her heart that she doesn't love him. No, she never loved him. It was only a childhood crush that faded rather than grew stronger with distance. Yet still she stands at his side and kisses him when they're officially declared mates, that piece of legal paper the only real bond between the young couple.
She hides the coldness as she enters training in the genetics program by his side, claiming that she doesn't want to leave his side. He buys this, and lets her in on all the secrets he's learned from his top-notch geneticist father. She hoards the secrets like gems inside her, surpassing all the females in her class and garnering words of praise from her teachers.
It's no surprise, then, that when Raine's father retires he passes the mantle of lead geneticist for the Smeet Section on to his son, and it's no surprise his son names his beloved mate to his second in command. The first years are good, then comes the mission of collecting genetic samples from Irkens station on a distant planet, to determine if the planet's environment were damaging their genes.
When the ship takes off, she's very far along with her and Raine's third set of smeets, the earlier two sets having been sent off to the training programs without so much as a wave from their parents. This time though, Raine thinks, they've finally got enough prestige to be able to hire a nanny to raise their infants while they're at work. She's looking forward to being a real mother for the first time in her life.
While she is off exploring the planet, despite being warned not to, the ships are attacked. The base is destroyed; alarm sirens blare warning every living Irken on the planet to get back to the ships to make an emergency escape. She's too far away when the warning sirens go off to make it back in time, tears drip from her eyes as she watches the ships fly off into the distance.
She's in shock at first. How could Raine leave her and their unborn eggs behind like that, she asks herself as she wanders through the burning remains of the base. She wouldn't have let them take her aboard the ships without him. They'd promised that if one of them were left behind, the other would wait for them. Apparently, her life meant nothing to Raine when his own life was in question.
The eggs were born in the charred remains of the base, where she slept during the day and crept out during the night to feed on what few insects she could catch. Despite her best efforts to keep the eggs warm, the tiny smeets died within minutes of being born, as she had absolutely no way to get the necessary packs for their survival.
She burned their bodies in the center of what remained of the base; not caring if it gave her away to the enemy. Without Raine and without her children, her body had no will to live anyway. Her dreams have blocked out exactly what happened, how she came to awaken in the middle of the enemy's village, but she remembers her first thought being "Why aren't I dead?"
The villagers turn out to be kind and wonderful creatures, not the monsters the ship commander warned her would eat her up if she dared stray too far from the base. They feed her and bring her back to health; bearing no ill will against her as they can tell that she is not a soldier from how poor of condition she was in. She grows to love the people of the planet and all their ways. She grows to have a place in their society, and she's happier than she's ever been in her life.
Then the Irkens return. She runs to the ships and falls to her knees, pleading for the lives of the planet's inhabitants, but she can't stop the bloodthirsty generals and their legions of armies. She's knocked unconscious and chained to a wall so that she can't hurt herself, supposedly. Through tear-filled eyes, she watches as the people who had made her happier than she ever thought she could be are slaughtered. She tries to kill herself when she spots the bloody hide of her closest friend hanging off a drying rack the next day.
In her pain, she comes to hate the Empire. Returned to Raine's arms, he tries to change her mind. They were dangerous, he says. They were monsters. She tells him she doesn't buy his shit. He tells her thoughts could have her tortured for treason.
She lays their fourth set of eggs, actually a single egg, against her will. She never wanted to let Raine touch her again for leaving her there, for not stopping the massacre of those she loved, but Raine is insistent and the law is on his side. The smeet she holds in her arms, however, she finds beautiful, and falls in love all over again.
This tiny smeet had only one arm, the other arm being nothing more than a stump. His eyes are dark black. He fails to respond to visual cues; it's likely that he's at least partially blind. She doesn't care. She caresses his tiny body as she cleans the bits of egg from his happily squeaking form.
Then the soldiers come, knocking her over and ripping her tiny smeet from her arms. She cries his name as she's restrained, watching him carried away. She screams for him as he cries out for her, as the doctors who deemed him too deformed to live inject the lethal poison into his veins. She breaks free from the soldiers in an act of sheer adrenaline and runs down to the disposal lab, only to find that the most she can do is hold her dead son in her arms.
What would have broken any other woman made her stronger, more dangerous than she'd even been. The last piece of Whisper that still struggled in her soul died, leaving behind a cold and empty chamber in the center of her chest. She attacks Raine when he tries to touch her; after awhile they no longer mate. In her mind, she's decided what she must do. Killing the tallests won't change anything; they'll simply be replaced by creatures of a similar nature. No, she must replace the tallests… replace them with a passionate creature.
In the darkness of the night she attempts to steal the tallests' genes, to breed a smeet upon herself that will grow tall enough to become ruler of the Empire. She will raise this smeet herself, with all the love she can give it. Raine catches her on her way out of the lab, and the smeet is ripped from her body to be raised as just another nameless soldier in a tube. She cries for her black-eyed son, she cries for the son or daughter she never even got to feel within her.
For several long years, she lives only in dreams. Frozen in a cryogenic tube designed to house dangerous anti-Empire criminals, those long years of her life drain away as quickly as the tears that froze to her face. She doesn't remember what she dreamed all those years; she doesn't even remember if she dreamed.
She dreams of the moment when she woke up, finding her once beautiful antennae split and dark wrinkles forming under her eyes from how badly dehydrated her skin was. Being a vain creature at heart, this is the last straw in ripping apart her soul. Nothing of innocence remains in her; she is a shattered being.
She is a monster.
That's the point in Willow's dreams where she always wakes up. This dream is no exception; she's jarred awake with dried tears on her face and splattered across the control panel. It's the middle of the night, but she knows she can't sleep again after that dream. She never sleeps again after that dream.