Interlude: Carbonite Dreams
A planet dies and nothing changes.
So it goes in the endless war between Empire and Republic. There is no time to mourn the dead of Ziost- life goes on, with codes to crack and plans to ruin.
For a little while they all fall back into fighting. It isn't a cold war any more (it never was, really, not since Taris, but Corellia ripped the mask off for good and the face underneath just keeps getting uglier) but on the ground it feels the same: all the same schemes and traps and machinations, a dozen Republic agents dead by her hand in a six-month span and a dozen fresh scars to show for it. She throws herself headlong into her assignments, into the comfort of work. After years of conditioning spycraft comes as easily as breathing to her, the adrenaline through her veins with each success a bliss better than any drug she's ever tried. Work creates routine. Work creates order from disorder.
Work lets her stop thinking about Theron.
She'd been pretty sure, at first, that after Yavin she'd gotten him out of her system. She's a Cipher, after all, and her life affords precious little room for sentiment; it should have been the same game she's played with so many other men and women since her training days- highly enjoyable and emphatically finite. It should have been over with the end of their truce.
It should have been.
It wasn't, for either of them, and Ziost only proved it. He hasn't tried to contact her again, at least, but she hasn't changed her 'net address either.
Ciphers don't get happy endings. The thought's a quiet hiss in the back of her mind. Remember what happened to Cipher Three?
(She remembers. Temple held it together for an hour after she came back, then Vector found her sobbing in the 'fresher with a holoportrait clutched in her hands.
They'd been a beautiful family. Raina looked just like her father.)
If she distracts herself enough, focuses on the task at hand or the target in front of her, there are times when she forgets, when that voice goes silent. She is detached, objective. She is an excellent liar, especially to herself.
There are times, though, when she remembers, when in the heat of fighting she pulls her knife-strikes just short enough to catch glimpses of a face in profile- just short enough to make sure it isn't him, before she lets the blade sink in.
It isn't him. It's never him.
She wonders, though, every time a console doesn't explode in her face, every time a sniper's bullet hits wide, if there are times when he does the same thing. She wonders if a day will come when he can't.
Then Korriban falls.
They should have been more careful with this new enemy. They still believed they were invincible, then, she and Lana and Darth Marr, fresh from their triumphs over the Republic and over Revan. (They refuse to consider the horror that was Ziost, the ten thousand other atrocities the Emperor committed. To consider them is to accept them, and with acceptance they would have stopped fighting for the Empire long ago.) But Marr falls, too, and the Emperor falls, and then she is dying on the floor before the Eternal Throne.
She didn't think dying would hurt so much.
For five long years she dreams carbonite dreams, scattered, broken dreams, with slow poison fracturing her thoughts and Vitiate's presence (Valkorion, he calls himself now, but she knows him for who he is) in her mind twisting them into ugly, distorted things. Still, she dreams of Theron: side by side, fighting against Revan and against the Emperor; his body crumpled on the ground, beside Kaliyo and Vector and Lana and Raina, beside her destroyed ship and all the others she knows she failed; in a stolen moment in an empty shuttle, against her and inside her and every kiss a promise they both knew they weren't allowed to keep.
For five long years, she dies a little every day.
And then, one day, she wakes.