The Empire Aeterna is in turmoil. With the Resistance in tatters and the Divine Emperor Zen Shigaraki badly injured, the status quo is unstable for the first time in centuries. While the Emperor seeks to redirect attention with a spectacle-ridden search for Crown Prince Tomura's bride, a desperate Resistance leader tracks you down and charges you with helping to raise the Resistance from the ashes. What can someone like you do against an Empire that's stood for thousands of years? You and everyone else are about to find out. (cross-posted to Ao3)
posting this in celebration of Tomura's birthday! thanks to @shigarakislaughter for beta-reading and encouraging me.
Chapter 1
You don’t usually dream. Your matrix integration is glitchy enough to make sleep difficult, so dreaming is close to an impossibility, and when you do have one, it’s faint, blurry, nothing more than an afterimage by the time you open your eyes. It’s been years since you had a dream you could remember. Even longer since you had one that felt like it meant something. And yet, when the door to your six-bed dormitory bangs open four standard hours before your shift, it snaps you out of a dream.
Your dormmates pitch a fit, which is what you would do if you thought it would matter at all. Instead you stare up at the low ceiling, trying to call back your dream. You were back home on Montressor, staring up into the vastness of space through an atmosphere tinted silver and gold. When you were a child space frightened you, made you feel small and unknown, but now there’s a comfort in it; you are small. You are unknown. Once you acknowledge your place among the familiar constellations, there’s nothing to fear.
But the constellations weren’t familiar in your dream. The space where the stars you were born under should have been was empty of them, filled instead with a shifting, roiling blackness that spread like a fuel spill. It crossed hundreds of thousands of light years instantaneously, swallowing star after star, following no known law of the cosmos, spitting in the face of gravity. The sight repulsed you, angered you – but you weren’t afraid. Not even when you realized it was coming for you.
Maybe you would have been scared, if you’d kept dreaming – but you’re awake. You sit up, wincing as a sharp edge in your shoulder plate bites into the muscles keeping it steady, and tune in as the person who woke up your dorm shouts your dormmates down. “It’s good news, space trash. Shut up and listen! The war is over! We’ve won!”
Even with your fucked-up matrix, you don’t have a problem identifying this silence as awkward. No, maybe it’s tense. “Who’s we?” one of your dormmates asks. Her hand creeps up to her sigil, covering the crossed crescent there. “Who won?”
“We won,” the newcomer says. You think he might be a supervisor from a different shift. You’ve heard his voice on the comms, but never seen his face. “The Emperor’s forces crushed the insurgents, and every single scumworld that helped them out. He’s brought peace to the galaxy at last!”
He’s picked the wrong audience for this. You haven’t bothered to learn much about your dormmates, but nobody working this close to the edge of the Torus is from a favored world. The supervisor glances around, a disgusted look settling over his face. “Go back to bed,” he says. “Workloads double in the morning.”
As soon as the door shuts behind him, one of your dormmates lunges for the wallscreen, cueing up the newsfeed. An Imperial spokesman is on air, and you pick up the audio mid-sentence. “ – at great cost, as so many great victories do. The Divine Emperor will recover from the wounds inflicted by the rebel leader’s cowardly suicide attack –” The feed cuts, revealing the Imperial flagship, revealing a single starfighter breaking through its shield, plowing into the bridge. “ – but the rebels will never recover from their defeat at Aeterna’s hands. I am pleased to report the utter destruction of the rebel fleet, and the righteous punishment of those star systems that turned against their fellows.”
More footage flashes across the screen, revealing a system scorched lifeless, blackened planets fragmenting before a last gasp of solar wind from a dying star. “This is not a time for grief,” the spokesman says, even as your dormmates suck down anguished breaths, stumble back to their bunks on nerveless legs. “This is a time to celebrate. As always, the Divine Emperor receives your prayers for his recovery, and bids you rejoice in the peace he has brought to the Empire.”
The screen cuts again, to celebrations already occurring in the Nexus, crowds in the Torus reacting in euphoria to the news. One of your dormmates flicks her finger across the screen and cuts the audio. “The Emperor’s peace,” she says, her smile twisting painfully. “There’s only one kind of peace he brings. And nobody gets to rejoice in that.”
“Be careful what you say,” another dormmate admonishes. “If anyone hears –”
“This far into the Penumbra? No one cares,” the first says. “There aren’t any prizes for kissing Emperor Zen’s feet out here. Assuming he’s got any feet left.”
Now that you think about it, it’s strange that the Empire showed the footage of the attack on the Imperial flagship. Stranger that they admitted to the Emperor’s injuries. For the Empire to acknowledge that the Divine Emperor was hurt, it must mean his injuries are too severe to hide. “The Divine Emperor brought peace,” the oldest of your dormmates repeats. “Peace in a war that’s been going on longer than you or I have been alive. After all of that, peace is worth the price.”
“Say that again once you know what the price was.” The girl who spoke first shakes her head. “There’s a reason that Imperial spacewad didn’t spell it out.”
He didn’t spell it out, but you and the others find out anyway, as news from all corners of the galaxy trickles in. As you climb into your skiff and clock in for your twelve-hour shift at the spacedocks, the trickle widens into a flood. The official comms channels are supposed to be used for work-related matters only, but anyone who might know anything is talking, and anyone who grew up offworld – which is everyone, given that LQ-221 is a spaceport anchored to an asteroid in the Deika belt – is listening and asking questions. Trying to understand what happened. Trying to find out if they still have a homeworld to go back to.
The price the galaxy paid for the Emperor’s peace continues to rise. The count of scoured worlds climbs into the dozens, then the hundreds. Anger simmers in every voice that crosses the comms, and fear makes them shake. You should be angry, too, and you’ve got more reason to be scared than most of the others – Montressor is a Penumbral world, and it’s already hosted one Imperial massacre. You’ve spent the past eight years rim-hopping, working your way steadily inward to reach home, and it might not even be there anymore. No one could blame you for giving in for a few seconds.
You could, because you know better. Courtesy of your cybernetics, the integration between the hemispheres of your brain is flawed, leaving you with the ability to function from either emotion or logic – not both. If you try to access emotion, it rules you. Settling into logic walls off the part of yourself that feels, interprets, dreams. When you think about it long enough, you’re aware that you’re losing something by abandoning your feelings in favor of rationality, but in a life like yours, there’s not time for that kind of thing. And today, as your coworkers and people across the galaxy that their homeworlds have been destroyed, their families murdered, their cultures wiped out, you’re thankful that you don’t have to feel unless you choose to.
You don’t feel, you rationalize. It’s rational to feel a surge of relief when the Empire releases the full account of the death blow they delivered to the Resistance, and Montressor is noticeably absent from the list of systems that have been destroyed.
Detnerat, which owns this spaceport and thousands of others across the Penumbra, doesn’t care much about its employees as a rule, but as your shift progresses, you realize that more and more of your coworkers are going silent, and fewer and fewer skiffs are flying out to meet each trawler. Your regular supervisor is included in the disappearance, and when you dare to ask the new supervisor – the same one who woke you and the others – what’s going on, you’re surprised to get an answer. “They’re pulling everyone from a rebel world. Too emotional to be trusted,” he says. “Corporate doesn’t want anyone following All Might’s example.”
All Might – the longtime leader of the Resistance. You’ve heard stories about him since you were a child, horror stories from Imperial loyalists, legends from everyone else. It’s strange to think that he’s dead. “I see.”
“You should be pleased. They’re paying triple overtime for everybody who hasn’t lost their mind.” The supervisor transmits your next set of orders, and you disengage your clamps from the last shipping container before guiding your shift to the trawler that’s just arrived. “Where are you from, anyway? You’re taking this too well to be a sympathizer.”
He can’t check your citizenship, which means you won’t face consequences for lying. “Out in the Hadal zone. I don’t have skin in this game.”
The supervisor makes an approving sound, then cuts comms, and you go back to work, moving shipping containers from one trawler to the next, then towing the empty ships to the satellite station for repairs. It’s mindless work, almost, when you’ve been doing it as long as you have, and in the absence of something to concentrate on, your mind resorts to turning the few things you know over and over, inspecting every angle.
The Divine Emperor is injured, the leader of the Resistance is dead, dozens of systems and hundreds of worlds have been rendered uninhabitable, their citizens slaughtered. The Empire’s declared total victory – but it can’t be total victory, not unless they’re certain they’ve killed every last member of the Resistance. A destroyed fleet and a dead leader isn’t the same thing as total obliteration. Emperor Zen might have crippled the Resistance, maybe permanently. But as long as there’s even one left –
“Hey!” The supervisor’s voice cracks out across the comms. “We’ve got a dead stick headed our way! Drop what you’re doing and follow me!”
Out of all the wormholes in the galactic network, the one nearest to LQ-221 is on the tame side. Tame doesn’t mean safe. It’s stable most of the time, but every so often it’ll spit a ship out at mass ejection speeds, and if that happens to coincide with a mechanical failure on board the ship in question, it’s a recipe for a wrecked spaceport and hundreds dead. You stop a moment, ensuring a link between your current trawler and the satellite station, then disengage your clamps and reconfigure your skiff for speed.
“Hey,” someone protests as you pull alongside them, joining the flight of Detnerat skiffs and independent vessels all streaking towards the ship. “How did you do that to your skiff? Mine won’t even let me divert auxiliary power.”
“Are you jacked in?” you ask, already knowing the answer. “Don’t mess with your configuration. You’ll be fine.”
You say that, but as you clock the speed on the crippled trawler, you find yourself wishing that there were more pilots who actually knew how their ships worked. Jacking in solves a lot of problems in that it lets pilots treat their ships as an extension of themselves, but just like you couldn’t describe the precise mechanisms for how your body converts food into calories, oxygen into carbon dioxide, nobody who jacks in knows what makes their ships tick. Most of the time that’s fine. Maybe it’ll be fine this time, too.
As the skiffs reach the trawler, the jacked-in pilots coordinating smoothly while you drift on the outskirts, you realize that all of you have a problem. This ship is fully loaded. It hit the far side of the wormhole at full speed and the wormhole’s spin turned it into a missile, and the laws of physics and gravity leave no doubt as to what will happen if its speed can’t be checked. And its speed can’t be checked. Protocol is for the Detnerat skiffs to clamp onto the back of the ship and use their reverse thrusters to slow it down, but at this weight and speed, they aren’t strong enough. The heavier ships blow their clamps and spin off. The lighter ones are yanked along for the ride, and all the while, the trawler’s last entered coordinates drive it onwards toward LQ-221.
It can’t be stopped. The laws of gravity are inviolable – but there doesn’t mean there’s not room within them. Room for a suicidal idiot to try something insane, but you don’t need this maneuver to be sane. You just need it to be possible. You hail the trawler. “Disable your nav computer,” you say. “I’ll tow you in.”
“Are you out of your mind? We won’t be able to steer –”
“How’s the steering going right now?” You adjust your configuration ever so slightly. “If you have it on, it’ll fight me. My ship doesn’t have the power to tow you clear under those circumstances.”
“Forget towing us, you can’t even get ahead of us! I know what Detnerat skiffs can do, and they can’t –”
With a jacked-in pilot? No. With someone who understands how the ship works, who knows how far it can really be pushed? Maybe. “Kill your nav,” you say. “I’ll do the rest.”
The pilot calls you a bunch of names that that are worth a disciplinary write-up according to company policy, but to your surprise, your supervisor repeats the order. “Kill the nav, then get out of there,” he orders. Then, to you: “If you fuck this up, that spaceport is dust.”
You don’t need to respond to that. You know what’s at stake, and you know that what you plan to do about it is possible. That doesn’t mean it’s not going to suck.
The trawler’s pilot confirms the shutdown of the nav system, and you steel yourself, pushing your skiff to its top speed. Like this, assuming nothing goes wrong, you’ll be able to stay ahead of the trawler. Now you just have to attach yourself to it. Backwards. While traveling faster than flank speed. You swear under your breath, rotate your clamps into place, and guide your skiff up and over the trawler’s nose. You’re in tow position. Now the clamps –
You get one clamp locked, then miss the second when your anchor point snaps loose. One’s not going to be enough, but you fire your engines and start the veer anyway, knowing you’re about twenty seconds from the zero barrier. If you can’t turn the ship’s nose thirteen degrees to either side by then, it’s plowing into the spaceport with you riding shotgun. The sensors on the first clamp are wailing, seconds from folding under the pressure, and you reel in the second clamp. This time, you can’t miss, and for that kind of accuracy, your human eye’s not good enough. You squeeze it shut and focus your cybernetic eye.
It’s outmoded, like all your cybernetics. Warped from years of going unserviced. But it can give you detail – all the detail you need, so that when you fire the second clamp, it hits home and locks into place. Now there are two sets of sensors hollering at you. You tune them out. There’s what the ship is designed for and what it can do, and you know it can handle this level of strain. Your skiff can handle this. So can your piloting skills. And none of that will matter if you’re out of time.
The ship’s nose turns by fractions of a degree at first, but without the nav to keep it on course, the force you’re exerting starts to turn the tide. Spaceport command shouts orders to the skiffs still attached to the back of the trawler, telling them to magnetize to its hull and fire their thrusters to match your turn. You glue your hands to the controls, watching the degrees shift past. Seven, nine, twelve – thirteen, a nanosecond and a half before the ship’s nose hits the zero barrier. You’ll miss the spaceport by a hair. A hair is enough.
You can hear some of your fellow pilots cheering, but you’re not going to celebrate until this thing is docked safely. Now that it’s no longer in danger of hitting the spaceport, you have to find a way to keep it moving until it exhausts what’s left of its fuel supply and its momentum starts to flag. Based on the size and weight of this ship, and the fuel reserves it carries – you keep your mind firmly set in logic, but annoyance is logical at this point. This is going to take forever.
It takes fourteen hours for you to tow the trawler safely into port, with two mid-flight refuelings because Detnerat doesn’t want to put any other – slower – skiffs and pilots at risk, and when you finally climb down from your ship, you’re not expecting a thank-you. You’re also not expecting what’s waiting for you: An order to report to Detnerat’s contract machinist immediately, for a full checkup and diagnostic scan of your cybernetic components. Of course. You saved their spaceport, thousands of people, and millions of credits worth of cargo, but they want to make sure you weren’t malfunctioning while you did it.
Detnerat is going to pay for the checkup, and any necessary repairs. And they already owe you triple overtime for a shift that took twenty hours instead of twelve. As annoying as it is, you decide to take the hit. You clock out, and head down into the spaceport to the machinist’s shop.
You’ve heard things about machinists in the Core and Nexus who are barely worthy of the title, better equipped to work on computer chips than actual cybernetics, but the machinists out in the Penumbra are used to actual cyborgs. Most of them charge through the nose for it, but the guy you found on LQ-221 is still an apprentice, and his rates are probably a fraction what they should be given that he knows his way around first-gen robot parts. The two of you have had some interesting conversations over the months you’ve been here. You wonder if he’ll have anything to say about the end of the war.
When you hand over your order sheet to the head machinist, he spends way too long looking at it before looking up at you. “You got scanned six months ago. Detnerat’s too cheap to order monthly diagnostics.”
“There was a – thing,” you say. “On my last shift. They just want to make sure I’m not acting up.”
The machinist frowns, and for a moment you think he might commiserate with you. Or that he might call Detnerat and ask if they’re really planning to pay him for this. Then he glances over his shoulder and hollers into the back of the shop. “Shinsou! Client for you.”
Shinsou emerges from his studio, his purple hair spiked from running his hands through it and dark circles under his eyes. He looks like you feel most of the time, which might be why you get along, although he doesn’t look all that surprised to see you. “Hey. I’ve got an observer with me today. That okay?”
“For your license?” you ask.
“Nah. Just somebody who wants to learn about first-gen parts in case he gets transferred out to the Frontier.” Shinsou yawns. “Do you mind?”
“No.” The more people who learn how to service first-gen components, the better. You only had to deal with a Core-trained machinist once, and once was enough. “Let’s do this.”
Shinsou’s observer is older than he is, which you wouldn’t have guessed. He introduces himself as Mic and promises not to say another word. “You should ask questions if you have them,” you say as you shrug out of your coveralls and lie down on the exam table. “Outmodes have it hard enough without people who don’t know what they’re doing poking around inside us.”
“Good deal, listener.” Mic sits forward ever so slightly in his chair. “Take it away, Shinsou! Teach me your ways.”
Shinsou asks you if you’ve had any replacement parts added or any new subroutines downloaded, even though he knows the answer. Then he reviews all the components you’ve been fitted with. You hear that same list at every service, and even though it’s been seventeen years since you woke up in a med bay with brightsteel components threaded through your body and dura matrix in your skull, it never feels anything less than strange.
You suffered head trauma when you were injured, like everyone did, but the dura matrix isn’t to prop up your brain – it’s to connect the cyborg components in your left eye, your left arm, your shoulder, your lungs and your chest and your heart, all working in concert with the parts of your body that actually function on their own. In new-wave cybernetics, the connection’s accomplished through a chip in the cyborg’s brain, which communicates along a network with the chips in the cyborg’s other components, but that tech didn’t exist when you were fitted. All your components are hardwired.
“That makes problems harder to diagnose,” Shinsou tells Mic, “since we can’t just access a secondary port and run a scan. But it also means debugging protocols aren’t necessary. There’s no way to hack a hardwired system without plugging into it directly. And if you’re trying to plug in to a cyborg like her, you’ve got bigger things to worry about.”
“The components are tougher, right?” Mic leans forward. “Brightsteel. They use that stuff to build starships. And to support stronger components –”
“The body adapts,” Shinsou says. He glances back at you. “They want a full external scan. Which arm do you want the injection in?”
“Right.” You’re used to the sting as Shinsou injects a contrast fluid. He keeps it in a heated container, but it still feels cold. You turn your head, glance at Mic. “What do you do that’s going to take you out to the Hadal zone?”
“Might take me out there,” Mic hedges. He glances at your right arm, then your left. “I’m not seeing a port on you, listener. You’re telling me you made that save today without jacking in?”
You shrug, and Shinsou reminds you to hold still as he readies the scanner. Mic drags his chair closer. “Everybody’s got a port these days. Even the Humanists have come around on it. How’d you get away without one?”
“They aren’t common on my homeworld,” you say. The more you’ve traveled the galaxy, the more you’ve realized just how strange your homeworld is. Or was. “They weren’t when I was there.”
Shinsou starts the scan, and the reaction of the isotopes with the contrast fluid makes your skin crawl. “You’re Montressori, but you weren’t raised there. Your accent’s wrong,” Mic says. Your jaw clenches. Involuntarily. “Where’d you really come from?”
You close your eyes, struggling not to wince as hives and gooseflesh pop up on your skin. “Utumno.”
Most people have never heard the name of that star system. It’s out in the Hadal zone, almost past the frontier, remote and all but forgotten. Even Shinsou doesn’t react to the name. Mic does. He lets out a long, low whistle. “Utumno. Now I get it.”
“Get what?” Shinsou asks.
You know. You turn your head to look at Mic, daring him to say it out loud. Instead he starts talking through his conclusion, looking so proud of himself that you give into a single emotional thought about strangling him. “You were born on Montressor, but you’ve been away from home long enough to lose your accent. Your components aren’t just old – they’re antique. Nobody’s used parts like that in five hundred years, not even out on the frontier. It doesn’t matter when you were born, if you spent more than a year orbiting the Door. So tell me, friend –”
“What?”
“How you feel,” Mic says, “about the end of the Resistance.”
Now you know who Mic is. What he is. You know he’s not here by accident, whether Shinsou is in on it or not. “It’s not the end of the Resistance,” you say to Mic. “It’s not over if there’s even one person left who still stands up to the Empire.”
You’re expecting Mic to smile, to reveal himself as an agent of the Empire. That’s the kind of question an Imperial operative would ask, and because your answer isn’t quite incriminating enough, you’re expecting him to press the point, to back you into a corner. Instead Mic stays quiet, watching you with luminous green eyes. No smile on his face, no further questions. Logic dictates that you should let the silence stretch, force him to speak first. That would be the rational thing to do.
But Mic doesn’t speak, and as your scan continues, as contrast fluid continues to burn through your veins, you lose patience at last. “The Resistance ends when you allow it to.”
“I won’t allow it to,” Mic says. The last shades of humor fall from his expression and his voice. “That’s why I’m here.”
It’s silent for long, awkward moments. Shinsou’s scanner beeps, and he injects you with a counter to the contrast fluid before turning to view the completed scan. “I see a few things here,” he says. “Minor stuff, but since it’s on Detnerat’s dime, I think it’s worth fixing it now. What do you think?”
You nod without looking away from Mic. “I’ll go get my stuff,” Shinsou says. “Hold still while the contrast burns off. Mic –”
“Don’t worry, listener. I’ll keep her company.” Mic waits until Shinsou vanishes, then speaks, low and urgent. “The organized Resistance is on life support. Whoever’s still free is operating in isolation, doing whatever can be done to slow down the Empire’s search for the last base.”
“From what I heard, the Divine Emperor was badly injured, and he just scorched the Penumbra from the Maw Cluster to the Hokkaidan Arch. It sounds like he’s got enough on his mind.”
“Most of the Torus is in ruins, it’s true,” Mic says. His eyes are hard. “That means His Divinity has a big PR problem, and with those injuries, he’s not in any shape to manage it himself. But from what I hear, he’s got a plan. I have a plan, too.”
You’re not going to ask. You’re still not convinced he isn’t an Imperial agent, and after another long set of moments, Mic speaks up. “You don’t need the details,” he says. “All you need to know is that almost all our remaining operatives were born in the Frontier.”
The Frontier was settled on the Empire’s orders, but it’s never been officially claimed as Imperial territory, which means that the billions who’ve been born, lived, and died in the Hadal zone have no rights under Imperial law. Why would that matter to Mic, unless – “Your plan needs someone who has Imperial citizenship,” you say, and Mic nods. “You can do better.”
“Not really. I need Imperial citizenship and a homeworld that’s Empire-neutral at best,” Mic says. “That doesn’t leave me a lot of options. And something tells me you’ll be a good fit.”
“Why, because I’m from Montressor? I haven’t been home in a long time.”
“Exactly,” Mic says. He leans forward, his voice slipping into almost a whisper. “You’re a first-gen cyborg, and I know all about the matrix issues your kind has. And I know what people in your position do to survive. But think about why this happened to you. Think about what the Empire did to Montressor for daring to stand up to its rule. I know you remember.”
You don’t need to remember. If you let yourself dream, it would be in your nightmares. If you let yourself think about it, it would consume you. “You were there when the Resistance was born,” Mic says, and you don’t argue with him. “Help me bring it back from the dead.”
“Resurrection’s a big ask,” you say, keeping your voice neutral. “What do you want me to do?”
“I have reason to believe some big opportunities are headed your way,” Mic says. “When they get here, say yes.”
That’s impressively vague. It occurs to you for the first time that Mic might be worried that you’re an Imperial agent. “Say yes to some opportunities. Then what?”
“Then act as you see fit,” Mic says, “keeping in mind that the goal is to buy time. The Emperor wants the galaxy to look elsewhere from him. You’ll be part the effort to keep the Emperor looking elsewhere from us.”
Buy time, but act as you see fit. “I’m guessing all of this will make more sense further down the line.”
“Bet on it, listener,” Mic says. He tilts his head, studying you more closely. “You know, that’s a hell of a backstory you’ve got on you. Nobody’s ever talked to you about this stuff?”
“A long time ago.”
Most things that happened to you happened a long time ago. Mic looks intrigued. “Do you remember who it was?”
“Does it matter?”
Before Mic can follow up, Shinsou comes back in, carrying a lot more equipment than you’ve ever seen a machinist come at you with. “I thought you said minor repairs.”
“I was thinking,” Shinsou says, “as long as Detnerat’s footing the bill, you should go all the way. I’ll tune up the stuff the scan indicated, and I’ll touch up the pigment on your suture lines –”
You’ve been meaning to do that forever. It’s not cheap, and although the gold pigment you’ve injected to detail your suture lines and make them stand out against your skin looks decent even when it’s faded, you prefer it brighter. “Not gonna lie, listener, this is a look,” Mic remarks. He doesn’t touch them, which is a relief – except instead of touching them, he leans forward, brushes your hair off the back of your neck, and whistles. “Get a load of that.”
“What?” Shinsou asks, as you slap Mic’s hand away. “She’s a Gravitationalist. It’s not that weird out here.”
“Definitely not weird out here,” Mic says. “In the Nexus? Batshit.”
“Who gives a shit about the Nexus?” You focus on Shinsou, more annoyed than you want to be. “The scan repairs and the pigment. Is there anything else?”
“Yeah,” Shinsou says. “About your eye –”
“No.”
“Let me finish,” Shinsou protests. “I couldn’t replace your eye even if you wanted it done. They don’t make these parts anymore, and none of the new tech is compatible with your matrix.”
“Then what are we talking about?” you ask. “My eye is – fine.”
Shinsou raises his eyebrows, and you mimic him, feeling an odd click as your eye socket shifts to accommodate the expression. It’s not supposed to do that. Your vision also isn’t supposed to warp slightly at the edges, and your eyelid isn’t supposed to catch when you blink. Your eye has problems. Problems you’ve learned to live with, because you can’t afford to have them fixed. But Detnerat’s paying, not you. “What do you want to do to it?”
“Replace the lens. That should make it a lot more comfortable to wear,” Shinsou says. “It won’t catch when you blink, and without the scratches, you won’t hit nearly as much trouble when you go through the retinal scanners at spaceports.”
“The retinal scanners out here are a joke.”
“The ones that aren’t on the ass end of nowhere work just fine,” Mic says. So whatever opportunity he’s expecting to come your way, it’s going to take you closer to the center of the Empire. “It’s not going to hurt anything to fix your eye.”
You don’t trust Mic as far as you can throw him – which is pretty far, but still. Shinsou’s a little more trustworthy. “Let me see the new lens.”
Shinsou’s still pretending this is a teaching exercise with Mic, so he explains that most older-gen cyborgs will want to inspect any replacement parts before they’re installed. Your inspection of the lens doesn’t turn up anything out of the ordinary, except that it’s not made of a material you’re familiar with. “This isn’t duraglass.”
“It is. They’ve just made some improvements to keep it medical-grade,” Shinsou says. “The old lenses aren’t shatterproof, which is a safety risk. The amount of force it would take to break the new duraglass is significant, and the lens is shaped to absorb the stress and break outward rather than inward. Much less risk of you ending up with glass in your brain.”
“It won’t matter, because I’ll be dead,” you say. You give the lens a last once-over, then hand it back to Shinsou. “I’m fine with it. Let’s go.”
By the time you leave the machinist’s shop, it’s been almost twenty-four hours since you slept. The lens replacement was quick, and so were the other repairs, but the touch-up of your suture lines took a while, and it’s not painless enough to allow you to doze off during the procedure. Mic stayed for most of it, making small talk with Shinsou and with you, and you picked up as many details about him as you could. Assuming any of them are true, Mic is the last person you’d expect to be part of the Resistance.
You, though – the only way you could look more suspicious is if you tattooed the word RESISTANCE on your forehead. You’re a cyborg, a spacer, born in the Penumbra and raised at the edge of the Hadal zone, and if that wasn’t telling enough, you were born on Montressor. Add your birthdate to that mix, and even the smallest child in the most insulated pocket of the Nexus could guess which side you’d line up with. What use could the Resistance possibly have for you, unless they’re looking for somebody too obvious to suspect? And while your background looks suspicious, your actions don’t. In your travels across the galaxy, steadily working your way inwards, you’ve never affiliated yourself with the Resistance or done anything to attract the Empire’s attention. All you’ve done – all you’ve ever done – is try to find your way home.
LQ-221 is always well-lit, always windy and cold, but whoever’s in charge of environmental maintenance likes to soften the lights during sleeping hours, and sometimes the air is a little stiller than usual. It’s like that tonight, and instead of heading back to your quarters to get out of the cold, you find yourself turning in a different direction. It’s been a while since you visited the temple, not because you avoid it, but because it’s Gravitationalist tradition not to go unless you feel a pull towards it. If it’s where you’re meant to be, it’ll draw you in.
You’ve never felt that pull. That pull requires emotion, requires instinct, and you’re rarely operating in that mode. But you want to go there, so you decide it counts. It’s where you want to be, so it’s where you’re meant to be, and it’ll all work out.
Nearly every inhabited system, planet, satellite, and asteroid in the Hadal zone has a gravity temple, and the edges of the Penumbra are well-populated with them, even if Gravitationalists like you are few and far between. There’s no one in the Temple when you arrive, and when you step up to the instrument panel to adjust the gravity settings, you see that it’s set to mimic Actaeon, a far-frontier world. Whoever was here last is even farther from home than you are.
Montressor’s gravity is roughly two-thirds of standard – not an enormous difference compared to some worlds, but enough to make you feel like you were walking on air, like every step was a dance and every jump could launch you into the sky. Sometimes you can feel it when you’re trying to fall asleep, a phantom sense of weightlessness, familiar and unfamiliar all at once. You hesitate over the instrument panel for a long moment, then key in the coordinates for Angband.
The gravity doubles, then triples, hard and fast enough to bring you to your knees. You tense up and straighten your spine as the first words anyone on Angband ever spoke to you roll through your mind. Stand strong. It’ll pass. If it never passed, Angband couldn’t sustain even the smallest forms of life, but after living there for ten years, the ebbs and flows of Angband’s gravity are in your bones. You wait for it to lessen, because it always lessens, and once it does, you rise to your feet and turn your attention towards the viewscreen.
The telescope is already moving, zooming in past star after star, until you’re staring into the mouth of the nearest black hole. In its purest form Gravitationalism gives no names to black holes, but you like to know what you’re looking at. A notation in the corner of the screen informs you that the black hole is two hundred light-years away, that it’s made from a supergiant star that collapsed two thousand years ago, that its name is the same as the star it was born from. Aldera, once the center of the Alderan system. A system that died along with its star.
A lost system is a tragedy, but it’s not an offense or an affront, the way so many faiths across the Empire believe it to be. To a Gravitationalist, it’s simply the natural course of the universe, something inevitable, something larger than person or planet or system or Empire. Aldera’s collapse is what was foretold, by physics and by gravity. Railing against it is pointless, so it’s not worth doing. That thought brought you peace once. Every natural process in the universe, from the birth of stars to their death, from black holes drawing everything together or entropy ripping it all apart, is as it was meant to be.
But the mass destruction the Empire committed yesterday wasn’t meant to be. There’s no law of the known universe that foretold it. It was pointless and cruel, and it was a failure. The Resistance still lives, and it’ll live as long as the Empire remains standing. So this will happen again. And again. First on Montressor, on dozens of worlds before yesterday, on thousands yesterday and still more in the future. But it’s not inevitable. If Mic was telling the truth, you could do something to stop it.
Another wave of gravity crests, and you go to your knees willingly this time. You summon those worlds to mind, and add Montressor to the toll, searching for some invocation or prayer to speak to them. Gravitationalism has next to none. On Angband, they taught you to make do, and it’s something from Angband that comes to your lips. Something like a lullaby, cruel in its gentleness. You stare outwards, past Aldera’s accretion disk, into the darkness, and sing.
“Hope fades into the world of night, through shadows falling out of memory and time.” Your voice is rough at first, smoothing out as you continue on. “Say now, we have come to journey’s end. Dark shores are calling –”
Your voice catches oddly. Your mind blurs, and you swallow hard. “You and I will meet again.”
Angband’s gravity lessens, and you get to your feet at last. There’s one invocation in Gravitationalism, spoken every time you visit a temple, or encounter someone else with the ring of endless light tattooed at the base of their neck. “The heavens bow to gravity. So, too, will I.”
Your cyborg eye with its new lens is leaking slightly. You wipe it away, then leave the temple behind.
On the street, you check your commlink and find that it’s been buzzing with messages. One from a dorm-mate, one from a supervisor, and one from Detnerat’s highest-ranking employee on LQ-221, priority-flagged in red. That one could be good or bad, and based on experience, you think it’s likely to be bad. And if it’s what was meant to be, you’ll meet it. You set off through the spaceport, now officially twenty-four hours down on sleep, and make a decision along the way.
It’s an easy decision. Mic’s instructions didn’t amount to much more than following the path of least resistance, which is ironic, given the Resistance you’re supposed to help. If that’s all it takes to do something, you should have done it five hundred years ago.
Tumblr image quality aside, i like it when minions are kinda dumb. Also i cannot have been the only one to watch cyberverse and think “they should kiss”
Following the death of Dr. Hamm, there was a spike in hatred and mistrust towards Lucien, resulting in putting him in more dangerous situations. And so, while Lucien was fatigued and mourning the loss of a colleague, he was eventually paired with 096.
Their meeting is somewhat similar to TiCiNSTiBiNK and Beneath the Surface; 049 was a part of the termination program, having occurred just after the failed attempt with 682 and the unintended pairing with 106. The Foundation had their doubts on Lucien's ability to kill the thing, but with the deep-seated frustration towards the doctor and 096's failed terminations, they figured they should at least try.
So, they kinda just... threw him in without any information and hoped something would happen.
Lucien caught on pretty quickly about the whole face thing, however, and he was able to avoid death in that regard. Really, what concerned him the most was the absolute state Cyrus was in. Throughout the whole pairing, he was given no acknowledgement, and nothing he did seemed to get him out of catatonia. It's clear to him that this thing does have a consciousness, but it's been incredibly stunted under intense anxiety. Immediately, something is wrong, and he wants to help.
He's eventually removed after the two failed to do anything to each other, but 049 couldn't stop thinking about the creature. It took many weeks of good behavior and debating for him to finally be given a scheduled pairing (under the guise of aiding in their attempts, which, to an extent, wasn't really a lie).
Following this, he makes an effort to try to get 096 out of his dissociative episodes, both via medication and interaction. Cyrus initially takes no notice of Lucien, partially because he's so far gone, but also because he doesn't believe it's real.
Until, he starts coming back, and Cyrus begins to become more and more aware of his surroundings.
And instead of being happy... Well. It goes quite poorly.
Being aware means he remembers more of what happened to him, both recently and back then. He gets scared, and he gets violent. His speech is broken, and his body is awkward, but he makes it known that he doesn't appreciate the doctor's presence. This goes on for some time, getting progressively more violent and troublesome despite Lucien's efforts.
Then comes the attempt with 173. (Basically, the Consequences and Collarbones attempt, if it had failed and resulted in a few casualties). Again, another spike in hatred towards 096, especially with Dr. Daniels, who refused any more meetings with 049 out of frustration. They don't meet again until a containment breach occurs a month later, where the doctor takes a chance to find Cyrus.
To his surprise, this time, he gets no resistance.
The whole ordeal with 173 was very traumatic for 096, but it was the isolation that followed that really messed with him. He was more lucid than he ever had been, and keep recalling painful memories from his childhood, which resulted in a lot of distress. His fear, his tendencies, his rage, were just natural to him, but now that he knew why he was the way he was, it destroyed him. He could've been anyone else, but circumstances guided him into a terrible direction, with no way to go back. It wasn't fair, and it felt like it was his fault for being so stupid, for just existing and not doing anything to help himself, despite the fact that he didn't know any better and had such a rough upbringing. Lots of self-harming and panic attacks followed.
Lucien finds him during one of these episodes, and for once, Cyrus doesn't lash out. Here was the only person who had ever cared about him, who had done nothing but tried to make life easier for him, despite how much he pushed back. Nobody had taken the effort to understand him like he did. He still hated that he had seen him in this vulnerable state, but after all that had happened, he didn't have the mental strength to hurt him.
He wanted comfort. Wanted to feel... something. And he knew Lucien was the only person he could trust.
People who want to put the blame on one character.
Like sir. Uhm. How do I say this? In a way that can penetrate your mind?
They. Are. All. Horrible. People.
But they are also: All Beautiful People With Love All Consuming.
Both can be true. Because IWTV is the extreme reflection of life and people.
There is this comment on a fan edit on YT that was literally posted a day ago that I found.
I think we've established Louis is the problem. He is the common denominator in all these toxic relationships. Even his and Claudia's was an unhealthy mess. [Image]
And before I go on, on why this sh*t brings the movement down and I don't and won't tolerate I just want to bash the thinking of this person.
Let me ask you, reader and watcher, if a person in an abusive relationship lands in another abusive relationship are they the problem? Are they seeking to be abused yet again? Do you think they like it? Do you think Louis du Point du Lac went into loving Lestat because Lestat showed anger issues? Insecurities? No. He saw the best in him. He still fucking does. He loves the guy despite his problems. Do you think Louis fell for Armand because he was a gaslighter? A liar? A betrayer and clear child killer? No. He fell for Armand's ability to be soft to be gentle. He fell for his understanding. His clear care and focus on what he wants. His endurance.
"Louis is the problem." The problem here is that there are lies and manipulation from all characters. Louis is a lost soul who is more impulsive than the rest of the characters. He goes through life always seeking, seeking, seeking not really knowing what he is looking for. He also has fucking depression and some deep self-resentment.
But to say he is a problem because he is a victim (and he is because even though he has his strengths in the events between the Big Lestat Drop and The Trial he has been most hurt from both events more than Lestat and Armand (if we don't count Claudia because she was the MOST VICTIM OF ALL OF THEM DURING THAT ERAS)) is disgusting. It's victim blaming. To say he is a common denominator of abuse is stupid. He is the common denominator BECAUSE he attracts powerful love interests who are unhinged.
There is a huge power imbalance between Louis and Lestat. That was unknown. A power imbalance between Louis and Armand that was known but put aside because Armand gave the illusion that he was giving Louis the reigns.
To say Louis is the problem is blaming a wife being beaten, divorcing her husband and then getting in a relationship where she is beaten again. Clearly she's asking for it. (That's how this post sounds like) And. I. Will. Not. Tolerate. It.
Okay. Now that is put aside.
Like I said before.
These vampires are broken. One could argue being beyong repair.
The purpose of the books is to show monsters in love. Monsters who act on humanity but still take it too far.
There's a whole quote that says something about Lestat loving first and how passionate he is but in that love the only way he can show it is through violence. To break it.
We see Armand who is so loving and so f*cking patient. So eager to be loved. So eager to not be alone. Because he has been so alone all these years and then he meets Louis. Louis with a daughter. Louis with a burning, eager heart to be free this time around. Louis who represents everything Armand desires. To be free of all chains. And in wanting Louis he loves only him. Sees Claudia as chain too. Because Louis broke free of Lestat. Because Claudia, to Armand, is an extension of Lestat. Louis' capturer, maker, abuser.
He loves so much that he sees this as right. To get Louis all to himself. He wants this so badly. He even says it. "I want you more than anything in the world."
Words with weight. Words he meant. Words he carried through. He loves wholly. Obsessively. He loves solely.
And then Louis. Sweet Saint Louis. A father, a brother, a man who cannot exist or see himself outside of others. He is father, brother, lover, companion, son before he is Louis. This man who cannot exist outside others. This man who because of his spiraling self-hate drags others so he can stop the self- punishment. To get a reprieve. To put this love onto others because he can only love himself by loving and caring about others.
Who cannot love himself. Who drags the body of a stranger's daughter to beg for one himself. Who self sabotages and then tries to fix it. Who loved someone who hurt him because he can't let it go. Who thought he could love a man with burdens and control that was spiraling. A man who he knew felt the loneliness he had too. Louis who begs, demands and pleads and manipulates to get this fix of love. To put it somewhere. Even if it destroys the person he loves. (Paul, Claudia, Lestat and Armand) Just a little bit. Who loves then bites the hand that feeds him. Who loves so much. So much. He gets lost in it. Then drowns. Drowns in his failures. And drags others into it.
(Lestat: You drag me into your gloom. Armand: Will I be on suicide watch for the next 1000 years?)
And it's true to sense. He can't preserve his happiness. And sometimes he goes out of his way to not. Destroys it. (The killing of Lestat. The harsh words in 1970s to Armand) Because he doesn't deserve it.
This is all what it comes to:
They are humans stuck to live forever with these woes and problems and nowhere to put it. No where to put their trauma. So they make it themselves and then try to love with these jagged pieces.
They are fleshed out and more real than any character out there.
They are real. In their monstrosity. In their humanity.
They are horrible, they are beautiful, they are guilty, they are innocent. All of this. All true. All at the same time.
"I could not prevent it."
"...Was a band aid for shitty marriage?"
"This fascinating boy."
"I HEARD YOUR HEARTS DANCING?"
"Let me go."
"I love you with all of myself."
"Come to me."
"But she didn't love you. Not like he did, not like I have."
"I hate you."
"I know, I know. She's calling me."
"You and me. Me and you. You and me. Me and you."
"PICKED ANOTHER ONE OVER ME!"
"He's...a lot."
"I love you too baby brother."
"I'm not asking Arun."
"Am I all I have endured?"
"THE NAME! UNUTTERED in our home for 23 YEARS!"
"Could you imagine me? Without the burden of her?"
