Title: So Far Away
Rating: Mature
Coupling: UC (Khivar/Liz)
Warning: Character death
Summary: taken from Guilty Pleasure Fanfic challenge. Picking up from Panacea, Liz discovers that Max may be gone, but a part of him remains with her, a part that Khivar will risk anything to take.
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
He was by nature a watcher, a planner, called methodical by his supporters, and labeled cold hearted by his enemies. But he worried about neither. Navigating around press and gossip would forever be a trick of his trade, he mused taking another puff of his cigarette. His eyes entranced by the fiery halo of the Antarian royal seal surrounding the young woman in front of him . So magnificent were the play of colors, custom long engrained in his bones caused his right knee to touch the ground briefly in a bow before the need that had driven him for nearly half a century returned altering the beauty before him into a mockery that he would undo.
With the slightest of pressures he could snap her neck. Her powers would offer her a measly defense at best. Yet, all the same, he felt terrified of what this small human woman embodied.
No, he amended quickly. He was not terrified. Khivar Antari, the Supreme Ruler, of nearly four billion would never be terrified of a woman.
If one really wanted to get down to it, change terrified him. He knew of her capricious nature and how she could seduce her listener with the sweetest of dreams and then leave them stranded and alone in the harshest of realities. Things forever moved. Hadn't his rise to power been the apex of such an event? He had been the agent of change. It bothered him immensely to believe his patroness had left him for another, or maybe she had never belonged to him at all he thought inhaling the bitter nicotine and ignoring the slight tremor of his hand.
Chance dictated that he would find the royalists labs' three days too late. From his failure, his nemesis had been reborn millions of light years away forcing him into passivity. There was never any doubt in his mind that Zan would return in some form or another to take back want chance had bestowed upon him. Story after story had sprung to life about their climatic final battle. He knew the ending, knew with a crystal clear certainty that he would grind his enemy into a pile of nothingness.
Story over.
There would be no second chances. However, chance was without a sense of irony. He had imagined fighting Zan, not his woman.
"Is someone there?" her hoarse voice asked. From his vantage point, he could see the tear tracks on her sunken cheeks.
'Yeah, Liz. Your worst nightmare,' he wanted to answer. But, he needed time to adjust and learn about his newest enemy.
Hugging her arms to her chest, her eyes made another sweep over the erect stone marker. A look of almost stupid disbelief began to take root in them.
He clinched his fists at his side while startling need shot through them.
Where was that stupid boy? Rath seemed to be even more inept in this life than he was in the last. You never left a grieving woman by herself.
"I should have been here," Liz whispered to the cool granite.
No, he could not drudge that up again. Some things needed to be forgotten.
"Vilandra, look at me."
"Everything was just so out of control. I need order, rules. I'm a scientist after all. What is science without rules?" She lovingly caressed the stone. "I'm just making excuses. "I left, because I was hurt. Now, it doesn't even matter. I'm alive because of you, and you're dead because of me."
He shut his eyes.
"Why did you do this?" Frantically, he wrapped a towel around her bleeding wrists. Why couldn't he have been a healer? Because, you killed the healer a little voice in his head answered. "Why?" he kept repeating over and over as his mind struggled to process her prone figure and the blood that kept dripping despite his best efforts.
Liz wiped her nose and made a sniffling noise. Carefully, she placed her palm on the front of the stone. "Can you ever forgive me Max? I need you to."
"Khivar, he's a charlatan. He's feeding on your grief and nothing more."
Angrily, he spun around to his sister and gave her one of his best glares. It was a look that brought kings blubbering to their feet, but his sister did not budge.
"The dead don't talk to the living Vari.. Vilandra's gone."
"Max, please," she begged her heart literally breaking at her lover's silence while he felt something break again right along with her deep within the recesses of his own being.
Later, he would spend countless hours wondering why he did it. He liked to tell himself his motivations had been purely tactical, but a part sensed it even then. They shared a kinship, one strangely enough he did not want to break. In that moment, snapping her neck was no longer an option.
With his mind, he reached out to the frigid air surrounding the grave marker. It took the smallest of pulses to speed the sleepy particles up. Moving faster and faster, the warmth seeped up into the stone.
Slowly, she lifted her head up. "Max," tumbled from her lips a sonar embodiment of her pain, her love and everything else in between.
Turning his back to her, he made his way past the numerous tombstones. He had enough of ghosts and memories for today. He would give Liz Parker her day to mourn, his gift from one mourner to the next. A predatory smile spread across his lips, but tomorrow would be an entirely different scenario. He had come to this planet to finish this and finish this he would.