(A/N)Cheers for reviews. This is supposed to segue into Thessaly's Little Silhouetto, which she kindly gave me permission to plagiarize (most of the dialogue is lifted from there). She writes better than me; go read her stuff. A clear up on Khashoggi's hair. I meant to imply that it turned white when he first tried the blow-your-mind-machine. Since this clearly didn't come across in that drabble, I'm making it clear now. Also, I'm inclined to think that this might stand better on its own. Comments?

They could have killed him easily, but the Yes-Things were used to doing several treatments, so several treatments were given to their Ex-Commander. The strong-minded, as he'd told her after his first experience under with the treatment, could withstand several treatments and remain sane.

He was in his cell when the Rhapsody came; his memories of minutia were gone, and he considered it a matter of pride that he could still recite most of Othello. They let him out with the rest of the prisoners, a dusty, bruised man in a torn grey suit. He followed the crowd to Wembley, because he had nothing else to do. His Killer Queen was dead. And she had destroyed him before that, so he was left, for the first time since he was at school, with no goal, no responsibility, no great passion. He followed the crowds, empty but for some meaningless words of old stories he'd pulled from the school curriculum.

The boy, the Dreamer, Galileo Figaro, was singing. The music had the starry spirit and dreamy imagination and raw emotion that he had worked so hard to destroy for Killer Queen. It didn't appall him. It touched him, and he watched the Dreamer with same hungry desperation of the Bohemians as the words bit into his soul.

The years of care and loyalty

Were nothing but a sham it seems

The years belie we lived a lie

I love you till I die

He thought of Killer Queen. The memories, triggered by music, overcame the treatment, and came rushing back. Killer Queen, at seventeen, beautiful and just discovering her power, planning to rule the world. Older, stretched luxuriously on a silky synthetic bedspread, laughing at him, that deep, throaty, beautiful laugh he loved. Older again, in a leopard print coat, a minion holding a hard hat over her head, as she focused the remarkable power of her smile on him.

The slate will soon be clean

I'll erase the memories

To start again with somebody new

Was it all wasted

All that love? ...

I have no heart I'm cold inside

I have no real intent

Save me save me save me

I can't face this life alone

Save me save me save me...

I'm naked and I'm far from home

He watched the Bohemians. They danced, he thought, as though they meant this minute to last forever, as if it didn't matter who saw them. If he was who he had been…

The security was outrageous. He, Ex-Commander Khashoggi, possibly their worst enemy, had walked in here unchallenged. He sagged against the wall, watching a Bohemian girl with purple hair open a beer. He wished he had the energy to reach out to get one for himself. She looked up and froze, staring at him.

'Hello, pervert.'

'I beg --' Purple hair. Called him pervert. 'You look somewhat familiar.'

'Guess you don't have a very good memory for the faces of the people you torture.' He supposed he deserved that. If he had the energy, he might try to explain. 'You look like the living dead. What happened to you?'

'What does it look like? I had my mind blown.' His head pounded in remembered pain.

'What? Really?'

'Yes, really.' He'd always been sarcastic. It was why, she'd said, he was better than any of her other people.

'Why?'

He hadn't been sure, after several treatments. The music had brought it back, with frightening and painful clarity. 'The Dreamer and his Bad-Arsed Babe…they're not lost, we just don't know where they are…'

'So, what, you screw up once and she sends you down with the prisoners?'

It was how they'd meant it to be: imperfections were intolerable. 'Correct.'

'Doesn't having your mind blown mean they wipe your memory?'

'Correct.'

'Then how do you know who we are?'

He didn't, exactly. Except the Dreamer. Galileo's life and Khashoggi's were so intertwined, he didn't anything short of death would remove the Dreamer from his memory. 'Those machines have never been perfect. There is a significant margin of error, especially on the…strong-minded.' He thought, ruefully, of his hair, of the necessary imperfection in the system.

'Such as yourself.'

'But of course.' He thought of all the Bohemians there. He was sure some of them had been in the lot he had consigned to the Seven Seas of Rhye. 'Neither were the designed to deal with…'

'The power of living rock?' Khashoggi raised an eyebrow. His vision clouded again, and he hoped he wouldn't fall over.

'Sit down before you fall over.' The Dreamer. One of the few people whose face and voice was demonstrably unforgettable. Khashoggi obediently folded onto a beer crate, because he had no choice. 'What are you doing here, then?'

His vision was cloudy again from the sudden change in elevation. Frowning, he replied, 'I was in prison. And then I wasn't. I just followed the crowds. To,' the words came to his mind and he said them, well aware of his failure to understand, 'the Place of Champions.'

'Right.' The witch-girl. He supposed that he ought to be frightened of her; she had the same charisma and purpose Killer Queen had. But years of Killer Queen and pain dulled the instinct to fear. 'Now what? You can't exactly go around spying for anybody; I'd say you're out of job.'

He supposed he was. He hadn't thought of it; he had never supposed he would survive, once he lost the Dreamer. 'I don't know.' That he was still alive, and that he was likely to remain so, was gradually sinking in. He looked at the Dreamer. Who would have supposed Killer Queen's successor would be so different from her. This boy, ideals fresh and sparkling in his eyes and music, looked at the Commander of the Secret Police, and those eyes said he was forgiven. Khashoggi, who had nothing to lose, returned the gaze, promising the loyalty of a worn-out heart and mind.

'Ok.' It was a bargain. Khashoggi thought about what could be done with security. 'But I'm not the only person who knows you.'

Khashoggi nodded, resting his weary head on his hands. Security. Linear thought would keep him sane.

'What's chilling, Dreamer?'

That voice. He knew that voice, a honeyed alto with sharp edges. 'What the fuck is he doing here? Galileo, what -- That's Commander Khashoggi.'

That memory had been returned, too. He didn't belong to Killer Queen any more and Commander Khashoggi had been created for her. 'Ex-Commander,' he said, looking up. Into gold-green eyes, fragile and defiant. 'You. I remember you.'

She glared. 'Likewise, pig. "I'll take you to the Seven Seas of Rhye."' She wasn't drunk, not yet. 'Bastard.' The word was clear, enunciated, and full of emotion.

And he remembered where he'd heard her voice before. 'No, I mean after. You were next to me,' he didn't looked at her as he tried to explain. It hurt, to probe those torn-up pathways in his brain rather shy from the remembered pain. 'They put me in my cell, and all night I could you…singing.' It came to him that it was the song the Dreamer had been singing, the one that had hurt him again, as it had hurt him then. 'Save me, save me, save me; I can't face this life alone.'

'Yeah?'

'I was surprised. I kept hearing it, all night, and into the day. All the time, this voice near me singing.' He wasn't even sure she'd still been there or if it had been a result of the treatment that he still heard her voice. 'I remember thinking, hell, she shouldn't be able to sing at all, let alone after the treatment.'

'The treatment?' The voice was ragged now, raw emotion overriding its natural smoothness. 'That's what you call it? Like it's some kind of medical procedure? What kind of sick bastard are you anyway?' Tears formed in her eyes and spilled down painted cheeks like drops of liquid crystal. He had never seen Killer Queen cry; he doubted she knew how. 'People like you shouldn't have that kind of power.'

'What kind of power?'

'Destruction.' It was a challenge. The tears and heat had melted her mascara and it ran down her face in sticky black streaks. When he just looked at her, wondering at the energy in her that sustained so much emotion, she snapped, in a way he couldn't remember seeing before. 'He said he'd always come back for me, all the time, every time he went out, and he didn't, and it's all your fault, and I hate you, and your stupid goons, and your treatment, and your attitude, it's like you think you're so much better than everybody else because they pay you to track us down just because we're different, and why is that bad anyway, to be different and to want to live and to have fun and to be in love, why is that so bad so fuck you, fuck the universe, fuck life it's not fair, because he's not here anymore and he's never going to come back ever and it's all your fault.' The words battered him, slamming into his tired brain, sending it screaming along painful half-forgotten paths. He stood perfectly still, confronted again with a barrage of images. Killer Queen, demanding that they find the Bohemians. Himself, sending emails to Yes Things, getting the results, organizing the team. Planning perfect monotony with his Killer Queen. And lastly, repeatedly, an image burning itself into his exhausted brain. It was a tall, muscular, black man in a tattered kilt, diving through a laser cage into a fight he couldn't hope to win. She collapsed against him, worn out by the storm of emotion. 'It's all your fault,' she said and her voice was clogged with tears. Gently, he put his hands on the sweaty, grimy, glittery shoulders, feeling the lace and the corset boning beneath sensitive fingers.

He closed his eyes, taking in her closeness: the feeling of her tears seeping into his shoulder, the scratch of her hair under his chin, the warmth of her body pressed up against his. Something stung his cheek and he realized that he was crying. It felt…good. Like holding her. It was something he hadn't done, something his tired, battered memory had no matching image for, something that merely felt right.

At some point she stopped crying. At some point later she pulled away from him and he let her go. 'What are you going to do now?' She glared, almost up to the standard of the witch-girl, intensified by the black splotches of mascara and eye shadow.

'I don't know,' he said tiredly, honestly. 'I think I will help your Dreamer.'

'Why should he let you?'

Groping for words, Khashoggi came up again with the words from one of the songs, 'I have no heart, I'm cold inside, I have no real intent.' He paused, hearing over again in his mind the lyrics he'd just quoted, like a mantra, leaving blazing trails of pain over his memory. 'He might need me for something.'

And you're rushing headlong you've got a new goal

And you're rushing headlong out of control

The Dreamer was singing again, and her eyes filled once. She said, quickly, 'Never mind. Dance with me.' And pulled him out of the corner, to lose herself in the dance and the music and noise so loud it drowned out all possibility of thought. She pulled him away from the wall and into a writhing mass of bodies, no longer individuals, giving themselves over to a new kind of unity; dissolving into music and flashing lights and hot sweaty flesh pressed up against someone else, anyone else.

And you think you're so strong

But there ain't no stopping no there's nothin' you can do about it