A/N: Hey, thanks for reviewing! Since there are people who seem to like this story, I figured I'd upload the continuation. There is an OC in this chapter. If that's not your thing, you can bow out. No one will blame you. Also, the use of the name "Beck" is a complete coincidence. I wrote this before Tron: Legacy came out. In other words, before it was cool :) That said, "Sora" is most definitely chosen with the Kingdon Hearts MC in mind. Lastly, any similarities between the planet Simoun's clone lands on and Tatooine are probably not very coincidental.
Chapter 2
Boota knew Simoun wasn't dead. He knew because time kept flowing forward. He knew because the beast human Simoun had placed under his protection kept sleeping so soundly. Things like that just don't happen after someone precious to you dies. Especially if that someone was Simoun. The hunk of metal tin can kept rocketing forward at a constant speed, until eventually, even Boota, as worried as he was, fell asleep. He dreamt of the day he would see his best friend again...
Not. Boota stayed awake for the whole ride, despite the fatigue he felt from evading capture on the beastman ship for so long. The smell of blood permeated the pod like noxious gas. There was no way he could go to sleep knowing he would be sleeping in the same pod as the one who had injured his friend.
The whip cracked against her slender back with a solid THWACK. A mix of pain and the force of the whip sent her sprawling to the sand.
"Get up you dog, and get back to work. I don't stand here in the sand and heat all day for you animals to be lazy." The human who had hurt her was called Kurtz by his species. She hated Kurtz. He complained about heat and work all day while the beastmen did all the actually work for no pay. Sometimes he would even waste his precious water just to taunt them.
The young beast child forced herself back on her feet. Then she turned around and spat the sand into his face. The strike came almost immediately, but she was used to it by now. She was more afraid of dying while she breathed than dying, so she continued with her defiance as much as possible. All around her, the beast people in the procession seemed to have given up on any hope of regaining the freedom they had lost twenty years ago. They were a broken people. Everywhere Sari looked in the procession toward the desert caverns, she saw nothing but dull, empty eyes.
"Why do you continue to fight them so, little one?" Sari turned to see an older beast woman behind her. The tears and cuts on the beast woman's scaled body reminded Sari that she had been one of the beastwomen the humans had dragged away and "taken" yesterday. Beast children were not "taken". The other humans stopped any man who tried to take them, but Sari had seen her mother "taken" and shuddered at the memory.
"Why don't you fight with me?" Sari asked the woman.
"I don't want to die." She stated simply. Sari bristled at this, and rounded on the woman, "How can you call living your life this way living?"
"You are young. You believe you have nothing to lose. But when you find someone precious, someone you wish to protect, will you still be so willing to throw your life away, I wonder."
"My mother did," Sari retorted bitterly, before she began the hard work of mining ice water from the cavern with the rest of the human's dogs.
Beck looked forward to seeing his young daughter again. She was a beautiful little girl, with beautiful feathery hair like her mother, and big brown eyes. Every night, he would sneak away from the other men to see his family.
Thinking back, it's hard to believe he ever fell in love with a beast woman. It was her people who suppressed his village, after all. Kept them underground, starved them of sunlight and kindness.
But she wasn't like the others. Ten years ago, when he had first met her, she had been a new born. By new born, he meant she had the body of an adult, but no memories or experience to go with her body. To this day, he remembered the way the prison's fires lit up her scared, child-like face. She couldn't speak yet, but somehow he couldn't leave her to be killed or worse by the mob of angry men. It was almost as natural as breathing. He hid her. He never mentioned her to anyone. For ten years, he made sure she was clothed and fed. He even built her a cottage in a place the men wouldn't think to look, but after a while, he fell in love with her.
The name he called her by was Sora, because he yearned for and needed her the way he had yearned for and needed the sky. He promised to fight for and protect her.
In return for his kindness and his care, Sora returned his love, and for the first time, bore a healthy child of human and beastman origin. Sari was their miracle.
Until twenty years ago, mining water from underground was prisoner work. Unruly humans were sent to the planet, Kalka, where beast men watched over them. The wardens and guards on this planet were the first to be gifted with wives for their unswerving loyalty to the Spiral King. The planet itself is unfit for beast men or human. It reaches boiling temperatures above ground, but below its surface, the air can reach subzero temperatures.
After Simoun defeated the Anti-Spirals, the prisoners rose up against their captives. Many men, both beast and human, died during The Great Uprising. But at the end of the day, it was the humans who came out in power. Now the beast people worked the mines where they used to work, and those who couldn't build their own cottages, where forced to slept in the cells where they used to sleep.
Sari supposed all the humans were cruel and merciless. Except for one. Her father had always been kind to her and her mother. He had built the cottage for them in the middle of the night. He had told her stories of his underground village, and of the man who had freed his world. The man called Simoun.
She had watched him try to stop the men from "taking" her mother, and she had never doubted that he would win.
"Father is strong. There's no way he can lose," she had thought.
He fought valiantly, with the strength and skill of a beast man, maybe even ten beastmen. But the leader of the men, Ratz, had him overpowered, brought to his knees, and shot. That was the reward men received for siding with livestock.
"So, Beck, this is where you've been sneaking off to these past twenty years. I must admit, she's quite a looker."
Beck snarled at him, and strained to tear his arms away from the four men who retrained him, "Don't' you dare touch her! I'll tear you apart!" He yelled at the men holding him down, "Let me go, you bastards!"
"Such energy..." Ratz lifted his revolver and shot Beck execution style. "Wasted."
"BECK!" Sora struggled against her captors. It took the full weight of two men to keep her still. Sari watched her father's body fall to the ground.
The sound of her mother's howling stilled echoed in her ears sometimes. After the men had finished with her mother, they found her. In exchange for her life, her mother offered her own in return.
"Please spare the child. She may not be of my blood, but she is still a very precious daughter to me. Take me instead."
Ratz agreed to spare her, but before he left the cell, he shot her point blank in the forehead.
Sari watched as her mother mouthed the words, "Sari, mother loves you" before a flash and a loud bang silenced her forever.
The sightless eyes of her father and mother were the last thing Sari had to remember of the people who had loved her.
That had been two months ago. Sari was still ten years old, but if what her mother had told her was true, than she needed to find a way to escape the planet soon. A child born from the union of man and beast was not welcome by either species.
As far as Sari could tell, the only real difference between a man and beastman, was where the balance of power currently favored, and where the weapons lay.
Sari would be safe for a few more months. Beast children, the most recent creations of the Spiral King's scientists, who had never stopped sending beast women even after the shift in power, were beast people who were forever trapped in the body of a child. As long as it was believed she was one of these, she was safe. But she wanted to escape today.
Suddenly, the ground shook.
Someone shouted, "What's going on? Earthquakes don't happen on this planet!" Stalactites crashed from the cavern's ceiling, scattering into sharp and potentially lethal pieces. Screams of panic and pain only increased the chaos. Sari ran from the cavern, towards daylight, heat, and the promise of a definite continued survival. She kept running. No one shot at her. No one chased her. There is no water in the desert. No food, either. The only way she could survive would be for her to return to the prison.
But hell if that mattered at the moment. She could see a shiny object glinting in the distance; and ran for that with as much speed as her legs could carry her.
Getting there felt like it took forever. The camp never seemed to get any farther in the distance, and the silver thing never seemed to get any closer, but the sun always beat down on her, until it felt as though she were carrying the weight of it on her back. Finally, when she almost wondered whether it would be better to return to the ice caverns, she came close enough to the see what the silver glint was.
It was a ship! A podlike ship, with a door and everything. It looked a little like the pods the newborns arrived in. Hopefully, it wasn't, because she wanted something or someone in that ship that could get her off the planet.
By the time, she got to it; her small body already felt like it was ready to collapse. Curiosity overtook her at the site of its shiny metal service, and she reached out to touch- it was warm. Something metal seemed to give way as her hand passed over it. The ship's door began to open with a suddenness that had her backing up, until her feet got caught up in the sand and she fell backwards. She still didn't know if what was inside the ship would help her or hurt her. They certainly didn't seem to mind causing cave-ins.
The door opened to reveal… another beastman. He looked wet, and new, still. The desert air would quickly dry him. He would be around her age if the body of a beastman aged the same way a human's did. Presumably, this meant he was a newborn, but she had never seen a newborn arrive with another animal before. The blood on his arms was also something new.
It didn't look like it was his blood. Did he kill someone? Was he attacked? Was he a threat to her? Something told her she should leave him behind. He would only bring her trouble, but… She just couldn't bring herself to do it. There was nothing she could have done to help those people in the cavern, but she couldn't bring herself to leave a boy around her age to die in the desert or worse.
To be found by the humans.
If he were found, the humans would force him to fight other beastmen until he either died or grew weak enough to no longer be considered a threat. Leaving him to that fate required a cruelness she didn't want to think was instilled in her. Deep down, she needed to know she was different than the humans who tortured and murdered her parents. Here was her chance.
Gingerly, with trembling fingers, she reached out to touch his arm. The small creature with the boy watched her with an unnerving wariness. "Hey, you can't sleep here."
His body seemed to come to life before her eyes. He shivered a little, before his eyes finally opened, and focused on her. Their eyes locked, and before her very eyes, she saw life begin within him. Not a life that was created for someone else to control, but a life he could call his own. He tilted his head quizzically, and said, "Who are you?"
She frowned, for some reason, she hadn't expected him to be capable of speech,"I'm called Sari." The sound of humans grunting and dogs reached her sensitive ears. Gesticulating wildly, she yelled, "We have to get out of here! The humans are coming!"
His wolfish green eyes stared her down with the intensity of a laser, freezing her in her tracks… Then he grunted, rolled over, and went back to sleep.
