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"There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach."
~J. R. R. Tolkien
Chapter Forty-nine: Embers
The air hung heavy and atmosphere settled dangerously. Not a word was spoken, and tension and anticipation in combination were so thick you wouldn't even need a knife to cut them.
"So. Here we are...again."
"Yes, sir." Mariah Bradford stood at attention, expressionless and toneless. Her father loomed, eyes searing as he vivisected her with them.
Jane Kelly clenched her teeth hard, trying not to be noticed as she reached up to settle her baseball cap.
"Thanks to you, the mission-critical target...is dead."
"Yes, sir." Mariah never flinched.
"Now..." Jane cleared her throat. "I don't know that it's fair to-"
"Stay out of this, Captain." Bradford's voice cracked like a gunshot, and Jane froze. Despite her rank, she wasn't immune to the aura that the XO carried around with him. Brown eyes burned hotter...and then colder, set in his lined face. "Took your goddamn time, didn't you, Mariah?"
"Yes, sir." Still no emotion.
"You received a direct order to neutralize a target and her gun. You should have executed it."
"Yes, sir."
"Instead, what?" Bradford glared. "You sit there like a rube and let her blow her brains out."
"Yes, sir."
"Central-" Jane broke off when a warning hand came up, locking her out of the conversation. She wavered, nearly trembling with contained frustration and...and...
"That VIP was our only shot at finding Doctor Vahlen." Bradford clasped his hands behind his back, very slowly. "Not to mention Outrider. God damn you and your incompetence, Mariah."
"Yes, sir." Mariah might have programmed a particularly lifelike GREMLIN, for all the humanity she showed. Her back was as ramrod-straight as Bradford's, her eyes walled off and dim, her face an expressionless stone mask of professional detachment...
This wasn't the girl Jane knew.
"Do you have an explanation?" Bradford narrowed his eyes. "Anything to say in your defense, Corporal?"
"No, sir."
"Anything at all?"
"No, sir."
"Look-"
"Then that's that." Bradford just raised his voice and rolled right over Jane, as if she'd been an upstart rookie again. "Do you recall what I told you, last time we talked, Corporal?"
"Yes, sir."
Bradford nodded. "Well?"
Silence reigned. Jane's jaw worked, but to her shame, she didn't have what it took to force herself between the Bradfords.
"Yes, sir." Mariah slowly reached up, and from her shirt she unpinned her rank insignia. Jane's breath caught when the brunette held it out, very formally.
"Central, you can't just-"
"You're assigned to the janitorial staff, unless Shen or Tygan's crew expresses an interest in you." Bradford didn't even deign to take his daughter's dream away himself. He just nodded to his desk, and waited while Mariah silently and robotically set the insignia down. "I wouldn't count on me approving any transfer to either department, Mariah: the things you could fuck up in science and engineering dwarf even your monumental stupidity to date. You might cost us the war...if you haven't already."
"Yes, sir." Somehow, Jane would have been happier if Mariah had been sheet-faced and weeping, as she had the first time. If she'd been begging, wailing, pleading...anything. Just standing there, just taking it...
"Anything to add?" Bradford crossed his arms. "If not, get the hell out."
"Yes, sir." And Mariah saluted, every inch the perfect soldier. She turned, machine-like and precise, and marched to the door, back still straight. It hissed open before her, and then she was off down the companionways, as formal as if they were a parade ground.
The silence came back, all the heavier and all the angrier.
"Sir..." Jane slowly turned her gaze to Bradford. "You-"
"That will be enough, Captain." He came out from behind his desk, sweeping up his reading glasses and datapad. "Your presence is no longer required. You are dismissed as well."
"...like hell!" Jane stared: stared and stared and all too soon glared. "You do realize she didn't do a damn thing wrong, sir?"
"Obviously she did, or we wouldn't be-"
"She had her cornered! She told her to stand down!" Jane made a wild gesture that probably meant something but she couldn't define it. "I got tranqed and assaulted in an alley because I lost focus, and you're not raking me over the coals-"
"Would you like me to change that?" Bradford loomed before her, so close and so sudden that her breath failed for an instant. "You're speaking out of turn to your superior officer."
"You're not in your right mind," someone braver than Jane snapped with a voice that sounded a lot like her own. "Damn it, Central, you're so wrapped up in finding Vahlen and Dragunova that you're taking out your frustrations on Mariah because she's convenient!"
"I don't like what you're insinuating, Captain."
"I don't like that you're being a prick, Central." Jane nearly spat. "And I'm not insinuating a damn thing, sir! I've held back from telling it to you like it is for too long."
"I don't have time for this." Bradford turned. "The decision is made, and I dismissed you already-"
"No, you're listening to me!" Jane caught his elbow before he'd made it a step away. She tugged hard, yanking him back around several paces shy of the doorway. "God damn it, Central - Mariah looks up to you! She's been trying to make you proud since she got here, and she finally does everything - everything - by the numbers, without a single mistake, and what? That's a fireable offense, is it?" Jane scoffed, glaring up her foot or so of disadvantage. "If she hadn't been there, sir, we wouldn't have cornered that bitch at all, and Advent would be on to us, and the team might not have made it out after she got reinforcements. Is your own personal grudge against Mariah worth more than me and my people?"
"One." Bradford held up a finger. "Don't you ever lay hands on me again. Two." He seethed for a long moment. "I'm not beholden to you and I don't owe you explanations. You follow my lead, and my orders, for so long as Commander Gallant sees fit to leave me in my post. If I give an order, you damn well follow it and you damn well don't ask questions, or I will happily throw you on janitorial duty too. And three?" His voice dropped to something akin to growl. "Don't you ever fucking touch me again."
"Sir, can't you see that-" Jane spluttered when Bradford turned and started off. He curved left, and Jane swore, rushing out into the open hallway in his wake. "Hell no! You are not walking away, not in the middle of all this!" She reached for his shoulder, gritting her teeth. "So what? You're so much of a stuck-up prick that you don't give a damn about your own daughter? If she'd taken a mag-round back there, Central, you would have spent her funeral telling everyone what an idiot she was for it-"
Jane's fingers found their mark.
Bradford spun and swung, and Jane ducked his first wild shot. She backpedaled for a moment as he came in with a set of boxing jabs and hooks that ought to have floored her. Reflexes kicked in, and Jane wove left and right, letting him throw his strength at the air instead of her face. Her forearms shot out, knocking his blows aside and redirecting him around her. Bradford stumbled, then came back around with a yell and a vicious elbow that would have shattered Jane's cheekbone if it had connected.
Jane punched him in the ribs, then slipped around him, catching his arm. She twisted hard, locking in pressure points and aiming for the floor. If she could get him down-
Bradford yanked, and he was stronger than she'd thought. Jane staggered into the far wall, then yelped and ducked as his left drove right into the alloy paneling. Bradford hissed, and then he lunged at her, pinning her with her back to the metal and unloading a dozen lightning punches in sequence. Jane's elbows came up, and she used them to block, wincing every time his knuckles hit her bones.
But he fell back, waving his hands to work out the pain. Jane seized her chance, snapping a roundhouse kick into the side of his knee. Bradford reached for her foot, but she recovered too fast, and then she twisted out of the way when he went for her face again. With one quick kick, she sent the XO sprawling.
"You have gotten old, sir." Too late, Jane realized opening her mouth had been a mistake. With every bit of a woman's cynicism for the male half of her species, she belatedly connected that there was no phrase - no phrase in the entire English language - that could have done better at dragging Bradford's virile pride into the match.
He came to his feet like a hurricane, arms a blur as he came for her, eyes almost red in the companionway lighting. Jane's arms blazed and jerked when she blocked, and she wove away as often as she could, hemmed in on two sides by the narrow walls of the impromptu arena. She cried out when a blow got through her guard, going right into her cheek and throwing her into the wall. She ducked out before Bradford could follow up, and he rammed his fist into the paneling again with a massive bong!
Jane reached up to her nose, and her fingers came away scarlet.
She limbo'd under a hook, then spun away from a down elbow that could have cracked her skull. Bradford was all upper-body: punches, elbows, knife-hand strikes and grabs. Jane, being smaller - to say nothing of her body being structured around an entirely different set of core muscles and a radically different center of balance - simply couldn't match him, and she had to use her legs as much as her arms, snapping lightning kicks into Bradford's knees and ankles and using push-kicks and side-kicks to hurl him back when he got too close.
"Got it out of your system?" she finally cried, as one of those kicks flung Bradford into the far wall. He hit hard, head cracking back against the metal, and for a moment pain glazed his eyes over. Jane sucked in breath, sweat running from under her cap and out from her ponytail, trickling down her neck. She paused to wipe her mouth, leaving a bloody smear on her sleeve.
Bradford lunged with a wild cry. Jane blocked madly, holding her ground despite the roar of her self-preserving instincts. She fended off half a dozen strikes, then ducked a much more powerful finisher. Again they came up, and now she attacked, throwing punches and chops that Bradford threw aside left and right. Their arms blurred and their hips twisted as they both threw their everything into the assault, breath coming ragged. Jane shot an elbow into Bradford's side, but got clocked on the base of the spine hard enough she went face-first across the hallway.
He came in again. This time, he read correctly when Jane turned out, and his hand snaked around her throat. His forearm locked against her throat, and Jane knew enough to know what was coming as soon as Bradford's hands locked. She seized his wrist, ducking and turning, using his own momentum to hurl him past her and slip out behind him. She kept her deathgrip on his hand, twisting sharply to put pressure on the joint. She turned her whole body with one step and a toss of her hips, in a mad cross between war and a salsa dance, and the XO nearly flipped head over heels, crashing hard on his back. Jane dropped her weight, twisting sharply enough she was amazed Bradford's wrist and elbow didn't snap immediately-
"What the fucking hell is going on here?"
Jane let go, scrambling almost a dozen paces back. She wiped at her nose, hurrying to her feet, while Bradford did the same. Both spared each other a death glare, but then their attention had to turn to-
"The fuck kind of ship am I running?" Commander Edward Gallant's eyes blazed, and his cane came down like the judgmental thunder of an arbiter-god's gavel. "We are at war, assholes! If you want to brawl like tykes in kindergarten, you can both get the fuck off my ship and do it in freefall where I won't have to put up with your shit anymore! Am I clear?"
"Sir!" Bradford and Jane got it out in one.
"John!" Gallant jabbed his cane into the XO's chest, hard enough he stumbled with a grunt. "I want you in your fucking office going over radio and network transmissions: anything we've pulled from Advent's network. If I ever catch you brawling with a soldier again, I don't give a damn how good you are and I don't give a damn about our history: you're getting left in a Haven somewhere in eastern fucking Europe. Get out of my sight!"
"Sir." Bradford spared Jane another venomous glance, but he did reclaim his datapad and storm back through the doorway into his office.
"And you!" Any exultation Jane might have been feeling boiled away very quickly. "Your superior officer, Kelly? In case you missed it, we are in crisis mode trying to save one of your people from Advent, and you haven't got anything better to do than pick fights with your own team?"
"Sir!" Jane's jaw worked. "He took the swing at me-"
"And if you hadn't been pushing him to take a fucking swing, he wouldn't have taken a fucking swing! It takes two to have a fight!" Gallant paused to put a hand on his chest, but he snapped it away just as quickly, as if he didn't want Jane to see a sign of his physical weakness. "Frankly, Kelly, I don't give a damn if he tried to take you to the floor, right here in the hallway. We have a war to win and I won't see you throw spanners in it like this!"
Jane glared. Gallant glared too, and he made a very threatening noise in the back of his throat.
"You do this again, for any reason, and that's it." Gallant made a sharp, guillotine-like gesture. "I spared you once, and damn if I know right now what the hell took a hold of me to do it. Unless you want your time on this ship to come to an abrupt and unpleasant end, you'll play nice."
Jane let out a harsh breath, but she made herself nod. Gallant turned, very prominently displaying his ear.
"Yes, sir." The words tasted like ash, not least because they reminded Jane of what she and Bradford had been fighting about to start with. Gallant nodded, and Jane fought the urge to punch him now.
"Good enough." He turned back for his quarters. "Get your ass back to the barracks and don't let me see you again until I need you."
"You been taking your meds, sir?" Jane glared at the back of his head. "Since the news about Vahlen broke, you've been on a rampage - and a rampage against your own people, not your enemies."
"Anyone who stands between me and getting to her, Captain, is my enemy." Gallant glared over his shoulder, and Jane shivered. In his eyes, it was as if he was weighing her life - weighing her utility, her functions. Taking the cold hard numbers of what she provided, comparing them to what he stood to gain if she was out of the picture...and finding her wanting. "Don't you ever forget that."
Then he was gone, and Jane was alone with her bleeding nose.
"When they move us to the yard, do they always take us by the same route?"
"Most of the time, da." Vasilieva watched as Elena Dragunova, feet up on her bed, pushed up and off the floor, rhythmic and intent. "Why bother alternating routes?"
"I suppose that makes sense." It made anything but sense. Elena had only been to the yard once, and she'd already noticed that the route their keepers took them along passed a door labeled Signals in the Advent dialect. If that wasn't an electronics hub with transmission capability, she'd eat more of the slop they were given three times a day, and allowing a prisoner to plot access to that room...
But she couldn't say anything like that, not with cameras and microphones on the lookout. Instead, Elena sighed wistfully. "It's not like it matters. One wall, another wall...it's all the same."
Zhang eyed her. The old man didn't talk a lot - as if he'd lived through something awful, something Elena didn't pry about - but she got the sense he was a hard customer. If he hadn't noticed exactly what she had, she would have eaten even more slop. Idly, she pined for good chryssalid stew, the way Volk's best cooks had used to make it. The aliens could be surprisingly delectable when properly prepared, so long as the bugs' venom was drained out first. People sprouting sacs and screaming as larvae popped out happened when amateurs tried to ape professionals, and usually let to the cooks' expulsion from the organization.
The hours - and the days - passed slowly. The convicts alternated between what working out they could do, limited as they were by the confines of their cell, and swapping stories. Vasilieva did most of the talking, passing on the tales of the other inmates she'd known prior to Zhang and Elena's arrival. If she wasn't a liar of mythic proportions, she'd been in here since before Commander Gallant had even been sprung.
"What happened to your leg?" Elena asked, nodding to the prosthesis one night. "Not to mention the rest of it."
"Ah, you know. You're young, you're stupid, and you eventually get too stupid and you're not young anymore." Vasilieva shrugged. "Made a mistake with a detonator."
"My sympathies." Elena studied her. "Are you a demolitionist by trade, who got unlucky?"
"Fuck that." Vasilieva scoffed. "I was trying to blow myself up before they could take me, but evidently I half-assed the job. I'm so bad with bombs I can't even kill myself properly."
Shortly thereafter, the lancer guard arrived to take them off to the yard. She checked the over very thoroughly, as if any of the inmates could have fashioned a weapon when limited to the contents of their cells. Elena could have, of course, but nothing more lethal than an improvised shiv, which would have been less than useless against body armor and an electrified baton.
Three troopers joined them when they left the cells, and Elena did her best to look docile as she shuffled along in Vasilieva's wake. She wondered why the blonde had taken the lead - with her ambulatory prosthesis, she was probably the slowest of them even when it wasn't snapping under her own weight - but she didn't challenge it, as it would give her a little more time to try and find a way to reach the signals room when they passed.
It was only when they rounded the corner that Elena finally wondered if that had been the point.
"What's that?" Elena frowned, though she could read the door perfectly well. "The latrine? I could use a break."
"Keep walking." The soldiers here spoke English - heavily accented English, but understandable English for it. One or two even seemed to speak Russian, which was only logical if they wanted to keep tabs on their prisoners.
"Where's the Doctor?" Zhang ground to a halt, glaring at the nearest trooper. "My team. I'm not going another step until I see them."
"Walk!" The lancer turned to him, and one of the soldiers approached threateningly. "You don't ask questions."
Zhang headbutted the soldier, instantly knocking him out. The other two shouted and lunged, and the lancer whipped out her baton. Elena stumbled backward, hands raised as nonthreateningly as possible.
Until they were all past her.
"Go!" Vasilieva gave her a little shove, and Elena belatedly supposed Zhang had done it to give her an opening. An alarm went off as he punched his way through the soldiers, and Vasilieva waded in with a whoop, one-armed but unhesitating for it.
Elena opened the door as quietly as she could, despite her temptation to smash it open. She hurried inside, carefully pulling it shut after her.
"Signals..." She paused when a technician looked up, this one fully human. His jaw dropped.
"You're not supposed to be in here!" That was full English, even if it had an odd accent Elena wasn't familiar with. Was this somewhere in the United States? Australia? Such concerns became meaningless when the man grabbed for something under his desk. Elena, not wanting to find out what it was, seized the nearest chair and-
Wham!
"Right." She stepped over the corpse with its shattered skull, ignoring the sidearm that was almost certainly DNA-locked anyway. She grabbed for the keyboard, hunting through transmission data. "Location...location..."
It took her valuable seconds to find what she needed. While she could read the Advent language, she was by no means a native speaker, and she had to parse through several menus of data before she could be sure what she was doing.
"No time...no time..." The sounds of the fight were dying down. Elena's fingers flew over the keyboard. First to create a signal, then to bury it under Advent's own channels...no, no, no...
"No time!" Elena changed plans on the fly. She didn't have the skill or the opportunity to create a hidden GPS pulse beacon that Advent couldn't detect, so she opted to go the other way instead, queuing up a burst transmission across all Advent frequencies, hunting for the facility's coordinates and throwing them into it over and over and over again along with her name, hoping she could simply overwhelm Advent with the utter volume of traffic. She found the send button and hit it remorselessly, every time it lit up.
"Come on..." She chewed her lip, thinking of Shen and Tygan and Kipler and Mox and Bradford and all the others. "There's no way they can purge this data from their system. They'll have to transfer it to a node for analysis to make sure I didn't bury some other message in here, or move some other transmissions in too..." She paused to do just that, giving Advent no choice but to leave her mischief on file for at least a little bit while they figured out what the hell she'd touched and moved. Not long, but maybe just enough for the SHADOW Chamber to pick up the odd signals and-
"Mor balaten!" Two soldiers burst into the room, rifles raised, and Elena jumped back from the terminal. She raised her hands.
"Took you long enough." She scoffed. "What kind of second-rate facility are you-"
The one that seized her did it by the hair. That was bad enough, but he then proceeded to slam her face into the wall, hard. Elena's nose broke in a flash of searing pain, and she cried out when the trooper promptly threw her to the floor on her hands and knees. She spat blood, thankful she hadn't lost a tooth, while they cuffed her none-too-gently.
"Been wanting to do that for a while." Vasilieva had no give in her, not even with her one hand locked in a sleeve that held it to her back, and not even with blood running from both lips and her nose, with one eye almost swollen shut. Zhang looked even worse, but even less broken. The hallway fairly swarmed with Advent.
"Get them out of here." The lancer glared alternately between her prisoners. "Move the lot to Data Extraction." The way she said it, Elena heard the capital letters thudding into place.
Looks like that timetable is even shorter than I thought. Elena didn't resist as her handlers led her off, and her cellmates in her wake. Come on, Tygan. Tell me your SHADOW Chamber registered my work.
"Of all the things I did not need..." Gallant thumped around his office, glaring alternately at anything in particular that pissed him off. "Children!"
"You need to settle down, Commander."
"Don't fucking tell me what to do." Gallant glared. Tygan and Kipler traded glances, but they remained silent after that, which was fine by him. Gallant spent a moment massaging his chest, feeling his wild heartbeat. "God, my BP probably looks like a calculus problem..."
The two scientists shifted their weight. Gallant pulled himself back off the ledge, then stumped over to his desk. He didn't sit, not yet, but he did lean hard on his cane.
"Well?"
"The SHADOW Chamber has been unable to-"
"Why the hell do I have you people?" Gallant threw his cane, and it shot over Tygan's head. He caught the edge of his desk, using that instead. "You're telling me that we have no way - not a fucking way in the world - to find Moira?"
"Sir!" Lily Shen stepped between him and Tygan, which was a fairly massive game-changer in and of itself. "We're moving mountains. I'm sure we'll come up with something within a few days. You have to give us time - you're the one who requested this update-"
"I figured you'd have something! You said you'd have something in a few days last time too, didn't you?" He paused to sing that stupid phrase under his breath a few times. "God, no wonder we lost the war. No wonder we are losing it!"
"Commander, I really think you need to calm down." Lily didn't yield, even as Jiaying started trying to charade her off with things like fingers over her throat and warning waves. "You're not yourself. Fear is making a mess of you."
"I don't need your sanctimony, any more than I ever needed your sainted father's." Gallant's eye twitched. "John and Kelly are literally fighting in the hallways, Mariah's been fired from active duty, we lost our one chance at rescuing our people, and I think Volk and Betos are down the hall plotting ways to slip cyanide in my morning cereal. You tell me I don't have anything to get in a tizzy about, I dare you!"
"There have been setbacks, Commander-"
"Well, Richard, if you ever get tired of sciencing shit you can go into politics." Gallant spat. "That's exactly the way my dad would describe a nuke going off in Chicago."
"Are you going to listen to us?" Lily slammed her hands down on his desk. "We are trying, sir. There are setbacks and complications, yes, but we are working as hard as we can to make up for them. It won't be long until we have something to work with. What you need to do, Commander, is get some sleep and take your pills again."
"Fuck off, Shen." Gallant's eye twitched.
Slowly, she pushed up off his desk. She glanced to Jiaying, then Kipler and Tygan.
"Alright." Lily turned for the door. "Let's go."
"I didn't dismiss you-"
"Fuck off, Shen. I think that counts as an order." She waved at the door, and it hissed open. "Let us know when you're in a right enough state of mind to act like an officer again, Commander, and I'll be happy to brief you on what progress we are making."
She left. Jiaying only hesitated a moment before following. Kipler didn't seem happy, but eventually he set out too, wordless.
Finally, Tygan turned tail, and the door hissed shut on Gallant alone.
"Bunch of..." He sank to a seat, and it was heavy and harsh. The noise of springs grunting was just...too depressing.
"They can't do it." He gently lowered his head into his hands. "They won't find her. They can't find her."
He sat in silence, clutching his temple, for long moments thereafter.
"...it's over." Those two words were harsh, acrid, and altogether revolting at the same time. Gallant closed his eyes, reaching up to nearly curl in a ball in his chair. "It's done. It's...it's..."
Silence. He listened to the thrum of Avenger's engine, and felt it through his shoes. He quivered, thinking again of his father.
Sometimes, the price of winning is that someone else has to lose. Sometimes, Edward, being in command just means you get to choose who dies.
"God...have mercy..." Gallant didn't know whether to ask for it for himself, or...all he knew was that God had to show it, and lots of it, because there was nothing left but darkness smothering all light.
There was only one option left.
"I'm sorry." For what it was worth, he meant it. Gallant felt wetness on his cheeks as he thought of what he was reduced to - and what he was about to demand from a loyal, brave, beautiful soldier. "I'm sorry, Jane."
Julie Richardson sat alone in her psi-cubicle, eyes distant. Her fingers worked: interlacing and coming apart, running over her knees nervously...and coming back again. Her heart stung, and her hand still despite her painkillers, and...
"Purple is a very dark color." Sylvie picked her way in, a bag in each hand. She tapped on Julie's cell door, and after a moment it accepted her voice print and opened. Julie didn't twitch as her friend came in, sealed the door, and took a seat beside her on the bed. She gently pressed one bag into Julie's lap, eyeing the ambient lights casting violet glows around the chamber. "It makes life seem darker than I believe it is."
"Seems pretty dark to me." Julie pried her bag open, heart nowhere close to in it, and pulled out Sylvie's choice for dinner. She barely even noticed the food, and in fact laid it out on her nightstand rather than eat. Her gaze felt heavy. "Everything's gone to hell."
"Oui." Sylvie didn't seem much more excited by her dinner. "Outrider is gone."
"We fucked up the extraction."
"This Vahlen has been taken."
"Who knows how many died when she was? Fatima's brother and friends..."
"Everyone is angry." Sylvie slowly undid the laces on her boots, revealing mismatched striped socks with little kitten faces. She curled her legs under her deliberately, hunkering down on her end of their shared perch. "Jane and Bradford are fighting. The Commander hates everyone."
"Yes." Julie slowly rubbed at her forehead, then put her hand back. "It's all gone to hell. One moment, we were winning...setbacks, yes, but we were..."
"Oui." Sylvie's voice fell further, until Julie struggled to make her out over the low hum of psi-readers. "It is as if a great curtain of shadow has fallen, enveloping everything and choking us with its dark embrace, snuffing out all light until nothing is left but glowing embers."
"Yeah. Something like that." Julie wasn't nearly as poetic. "It's fucked, that's what it is." She sniffed, wiping at her eye. "I wonder what Aunt Penny would say. Something...something positive. She was good at reminding people there was a bright side left in the world. Had a lot of experience, given who she worked for." Julie sighed. "But what's left that's...good? That isn't tainted?"
Quiet. They sat together, sharing their dismay, communicating without words. Every little noise seemed loud, and every slight jolt in Avenger's flight was like an earthquake, shaking them up inside more than out.
They sat through it all together, in silence unbroken like their bond.
Julie didn't know who moved first, but all of a sudden, she found herself studying Sylvie's purple eyes. She felt the ravenette's analysis on her as well, and that silence became just a little bit different, in a way that was hard to define.
Had they really been holding hands this entire time?
Slowly, Julie leaned down. Sylvie craned her neck, and in a heartbeat their lips met. Julie struggled, fighting to stay collected as she felt the warmth of someone else's touch on her, and the comforting blanket of care: the inner faith that she didn't face her life's disasters on her own, and that no matter what came, she would never do so again.
Something changed in that moment, even though nothing did. It was a realization of something unspoken but true, that neither had ever doubted even if they'd never known it, like two wayward stars in the same orbit, finally crossing when it mattered most.
They parted. Sylvie looked different now, even if she hadn't changed a bit, and the light in her eyes as she took Julie in was just as changed-but-the-same. The world was new, like a fresh filter cast over everything.
"There isstill light." Julie barely heard herself, but Sylvie nodded as if she'd shouted it to the ship and the world. It was a pledge, and it was also a challenge: a middle finger thrown into that enveloping cloud of depressive shadow. A vicious, determined promise that there was something no evil, no darkness, and no downfall could ever take away.
A promise that under that cloud, there would always be at least this one glowing ember.
Sylvie tucked her head into Julie's chest. Julie hooked her chin over her friend's - her girlfriend's - ear, and together they sat in the glow of purple light, arms wrapped around each other even if they didn't remember moving, challenging the darkness even to try and take away what they had.
"There is still light." Julie kept those four words close to heart, and she heard Sylvie whispering something under her own breath. While Julie didn't speak French, she knew it had - simply had - to mean the same thing. "There is still light.
"Always."
Author's Note 49: FINALLY
I have been waiting to write this chapter - literally everything in this chapter - since before Season One concluded. Julie and Sylvie FINALLY hooking up, Jane vs Bradford, the breakdown and the challenge to the dark...these are the scenes I live for. And these are the scenes that make all my sadistic character-torturing mean something.
I'm going to let it go right here, since this chapter is pretty long. I'll see you next time.
Until then, there is still light.