A/N: I am listening to depressing music as I write this, so that I can be really angsty – not very good at that! Please tell me how I am doing with this new genre…PLEASE!
Forgot this last time:
Disclaimer: I, poor pathetic mortal, do not own Andromeda. If I did, this would be the season finale or something…and only in the next season premier would you find out that it was a dream or something…but it's not. I don't own it. –cries-
Tears of the SunPainful Reminders
With a jolt, she came out of slipstream into a low orbit around an obscure moon. And collapsed, unconscious, out of the pilot's chair. The hours – probably even days – had taken their toll on her, even as skilled as she was in piloting the stream. An observer would have seen shoulder-length blonde hair spewed across the metal grates on the floor of the salvage ship's cockpit, blood slowly spreading from a small cut on the smooth forehead onto it's tangled golden strands.
She woke several hours later to the sound of a loud alarm inside her ship. She sat up, briefly disoriented, and groped the arm of the pilot's chair in an attempt to stand. Leaning heavily on it, she pressed the button that was obstinately blinking. A message appeared on the screen, stating that the people of the moon were scanning her, and small ships – not slip-capable – were coming to investigate her presence in their system.
She slumped into her seat, and grabbed a bottle of Sparky Cola. Cracking it open, she hailed the inbound ships. "This is Captain Beka Valentine in the Eureka Maru. I mean you no harm," she said over the open channel, her voice despondent and barely over a whisper. A face blinked onto her screen, and it was all she could do to keep from crying. "Captain Valentine! Welcome to Ymir! How well we remember the configuration of your ship – our father traveled here with you, am I correct?"
She nodded mutely, as the overly cheerful young man continued, "We would be pleased if you would join us on the moon's surface – would you?" She barely managed a strangled "Yes" before closing the channel.
Ymir. Where Dylan had fathered an entire race. Where every single person on that planet would remind her of him. Where she would have to do the most painful of all military duties – tell someone's family that their loved one had died. Why the hell had she come here? How, out of all the possible places, had her intuition taken her here? The answer came to her, as one by one, the ships on her screen exploded into fireballs, and a Neitzchean cruiser came out of the shadows of the moon. She was here to fight the battles others couldn't.
"Dylan," she whispered, "I wish I had never met you." With that, she turned the Maru toward the ship. "You spiny-armed bastards, I'm gonna kill you today. For what you did to him. For what you did to me."
She knew it was a suicide mission. Her salvage ship against a Neitzchean heavy cruiser. She also knew that there could be no hope for backup – she had covered her tracks well so that the Andromeda couldn't find her – and she knew that the Ymirian ships were no match for the battle-eager pride before her. Knowing the Drago-Katsov, they would have back up. Knowing Neitzcheans, they wouldn't care. Knowing her ship and her desperation, she'd make one hell of a dent. Going out in a blaze of glory, like he had.
"This is it, boys. You don't mess with a Valentine. Ever." And she hid her ship in the atmosphere of the moon, hoping to mask her energy signature for a sneak attack. The only way she was going to make a mark on this genetically engineered slime was if she took them off guard. After they got a lock on her, she wouldn't last long. All the evasive maneuvers in the seven galaxies wouldn't save her butt with experts in war.
"All, right, baby. Let's prove Dylan wrong about you one last time." With tears streaming down her cheeks and blood trickling from her left temple, she powered up her weapons. "You're not just a bucket of blots. You can be a warship just like Andromeda. We'll prove it. You Neitzchean bastards – eat this!"
"I can find no trace of the Maru on my active sensors. She has literally disappeared," Andromeda intoned from the
"NO!" Harper paced the command deck, thinking out loud. "She woulda left a signal, a directional marker, ANYTHING! Beka," he turned to the screen, "where the hell are you?"
Trance walked onto Obs deck in blind fury. "YOU!" she accused the stars staring out at her from the "window" "It's all YOUR fault that he isn't here any more! You hate me, you hate him, you've thrown everything in our way that you possibly could! You didn't want us to succeed! I HATE YOU! I HATE ME! I hate…" she broke down crying, and collapsed on the bench and sobbed her final word "…everything."
The hulking Neitzchean sat unnoticed in the corner, watching as the gold-skinned girl cried her heart out. He stared at his hands, for the first time in his life, unsure of what to do. The Neitzchean thing to do would have been to accept his friend's death (after all, he was just a kludge), and take his rightful place as captain of the Andromeda Ascendant. In the past, he had never hesitated to make the Neitzchean choice, and it had caused a lot of arguments with Dylan. Dylan…he shook his head in an effort to remove not only the memories flashing before his eyes, but the tears clouding them. He knew what his mentor and friend would have told him, what he would have done. He knew what his predecessor would have done, would have told him to do. His Neitzchean side collapsed under a wave of what he recognized as fully human compassion and sorrow.
He walked over to the huddled figure on the bench, and put his arms around her heaving shoulders. "I know, Trance, I know. Just cry. It'll be alright." She buried her face in his leather shirt and sobbed "But it's my fault! There was a perfect possible future, and I couldn't see it! I let him die!" She raised her tear-stained face to his, and he softly pushed her tousled locks back down onto his chest, more firmly enwrapping her in his arms.
"It isn't your fault. Just like it isn't my fault. Just like it isn't Rommie's, or Harper's, or Beka's. It was his fate to die that day, just like it will one day be ours. He died bravely, like a true warrior." As he said this, trying to comfort the small, gold-clad figure huddling in his arms, a tear dropped from his eye.
Another followed, and another, and soon he was crying as much as she. His tears fell freely down his face, and landed in Trance's hair. She looked up, and brushed them from his cheeks with her small thumb, and whispered, "Why, Telemachus Rhade, I do believe you're crying."
A/N: No, this is NOT a Rhade/Trance fic – never will be. Can't really see a relationship between the two of them, plus, this is not designed to be romantic…just in case any of you were wondering. I like writing angst. It's interesting to explore the different emotions of the characters. Hope I made them believable!