I also love how you write Xanatos. I remember in one of your one shots, on the topic of a clone deserter, he said something along the lines of Good for him! I hope more clones follow in his footsteps. God, I loved that line.
;)
Xanatos pulls himself out of Telos’s Sacred Pools, wheezing for breath and looking like a fully-drowned alley cat, and collapses face-down at the feet of a goddess.
“Well it’s about time,” the Daughter says, coolly impatient, and if Xanatos had any breath left at all he’d spend all of it attempting to strangle her.
“You're the one who couldn’t be bothered to bring me back on the surface,” he snarls back, but the Daughter just arches one brow, entirely unimpressed.
“A momentary inconvenience to see if you would be able to overcome a small obstacle,” she says, and Xanatos growls and pretends it’s threatening even when he can't so much as manage to roll himself over.
There's a long moment, then a breath. The Daughter sinks down to her knees in a pool of pale golden cloth, and Xanatos has to close his eyes at the touch of her hand on his cheek, as warm as sunlight.
“I can do little,” she says softly. “My power is fractured after my brother’s actions. You agreed to carry my soul, Xanatos du Crion. It will not be an easy burden.”
For a long moment, Xanatos just breathes. He’s wet, and he’s cold, and there's an ache in his muscles that won't go away, but—
The Winged Goddess was one of the things he carried to the crèche when the Jedi took him in. She as one of the pieces of Telos IV he held onto, a memory, a tie. Part of this world, his world, the one the Sacred Pools are sacred to, and he’d never believed, but it was a lovely story. A story his sister told him, before and after his time as a Jedi, and a tie.
Xanatos wants, desperately, to be alive again, with all his regrets and all the ways the world has moved on. But with the Daughter asking—
Well. He’d said yes, of course.
