Open Space and Hyperspace

"Duly noted."

Eralam, satisfied that everything was in working order, reassembled his sword and sheathed it before attacking his own water and bar of nasty. It was supposed to be chocolate flavored, but it tasted like chalk and cardboard pulped together.

"You know, this situation would have been a mess had we tried this last year while I was still a robot. Both prefer the be referred to as male, though both were technically not." The former Shard chuckled. "It'd be a stone bitch figuring out which one of us ended up in a dress on date night."

Eralam wasn't sure this was the time for a philosophical conversation. The air was thick with the smell of sweat and pheromones, topped over with a slight tinge of ozone. He was finding it enormously difficult to concentrate on much else, and he couldn't figure out why. And then it hit him.

"Right about now, I feel very, very human. Definitely one of those things that wasn't in the manual."

"Movie sounds nice. It's been a long day."

It was one of those rare evenings where there was nothing pressing to do. No angst, no heartache, just two old friends sitting down together, watching a cheesy movie and laughing the whole time. It was a good time, and when the movie was over, they made there way back to the bedroom, and that was a good time, too.

Later on, however, Eralam found he couldn't sleep. He had always heard that men were prone to passing out right after; it was often a source of humor among troops. He wasn't even mildly groggy, and if he tried to lay here much longer, he was going to go nuts. There went a fair few of the more raunchy jokes.

The former Shard slipped out from beneath the sheets as quietly as possible, grabbed some pants and a shirt, and slipped out the door. His gunbelt was over the same chair it had been left over earlier. He snatched that shit up and made his way back down to the empty cargo bay from before. The air was still musty from earlier in the day.

While the workout earlier had been a well needed release, Eralam hadn't wanted to really cut loose. Part of it was because he hasn't wanted to tip his hand to the Sith. He was headed straight into a den of them. While he seriously doubted they could do much to harm him, it was always a good idea to have a few surprises.

There was, however, another element to it all. In an abstract sort of way, he knew Sin knew that he was absurdly powerful. They had zapped across the universe for drinks, after all. That wasn't quite the same as seeing that power released, up close and personal. He wasn't sure how she would react, if and when she finally witnessed it, but Eralam wasn't sure it wouldn't drive her away from him.

That didn't change the fact that, if he didn't blow off steam, he was never going to get to sleep.

The routine started much as before, with every move in exaggerated slow motion. The motions became more fluid and rapid as time went on. If one were to take video of the sequence, it would almost be identical to the earlier iteration, right up until the ten minute mark. This is the point where the best normal swordsmen in the galaxy would be strained to the limits of their ability. Instead of slowing back down, the intensity only increased. By eleven minutes, a top tier Knight or Saber would be hard pressed. By thirteen minutes, there were a handful of masters throughout history that would have stood a chance of keeping up. Eralam still felt like he was moving in slow motion.

At fifteen minutes, it was clear that, however he might look, the being in the room was no mere human. Humans don't kiss the sound barrier at full sprint. Humans don't swings swords so fast that air friction heats the blade up until it's visibly glowing. And even if they could, no human would be able to contain that sort of power within a ten meter bubble at the same time.

By the time Eralam began to back down at the twenty meter mark, not even the bubble could contain all of the effects. There was very little in the way of energy leakage into the Force, but there was enough of a kinetic and thermal bloom that the cargo bay had its own little breeze blowing through as a result. That was gone fairly quickly as the evolutions slowed back into something less frightening, but the dust kicked up would leave the bay smelling musty for a day or two.

It wasn't until the bubble died away at the end that Eralam realized he might have overdone it a bit. He had limited the effects of his workout, both the physical and metaphysical, as much as possible, but there were still traces, the dust being one of them. There was also the unmistakable feel in the Force that tends to occur when a lot of power is released into a tiny area. To call it a disturbance wouldn't be entirely incorrect, but it gave the wrong impression. This was more of a localized turbulence.

While the urge to mess with Gorja was a strong one, Eralam suspected that doing so would send him flying into a murderous rage, and he wouldn't be easy stopped on the ship. Not without killing or crippling the fellow. And since Eralam had promised to take it easy on him, he wanted to avoid that at all costs. He had rather hoped to have this conversation on Kuat, where the Sith pureblood could be buried up to his neck and thus restrained until the danger had passed.

Instead, he was going to have to be dealt with here. Best to tread carefully.

"I can assure you that your emperor knows exactly what I am, and if she lied to you, it was only by omission. If you're willing to sit down and have talk like a civilized being, I'm willing to tell you as much as necessary to convince you that I neither mean her any harm or intend to influence her or the Empire. She specifically asked that I not kill you, and I'm willing to bet that she knows just how capable you are in a fight. What does that tell you?"

"The correct answer to my question is 'because I could,' but glossing over that, you're right. My name or features, as you put it, won't appear in any of the history books."

Having judged that the sword had cooled sufficiently to be safely sheathed, Eralam did so and hopped up onto a crate. He took a second to get comfortable before continuing.

"But that doesn't change the fact that I was, at one point in time, in charge of the place. Faces and names might change, but that means little in today's world." Anyone that knew the former Shard would recognize the laconic drawl he had adopted as his "patient" voice. It didn't come out as patronizing. It was intended to make sure the audience heard and understood him clearly. "Now it's clear you've done your homework. Has there ever been a ruler of Dressel with power on the scale of what you felt from beyond that door?"

"Yes, that's exactly what I expect you to believe."

The former Shard knew this would be the tricky part. If he could get the Sith to wrap his mind around that one fact, the rest of the pieces should fall into place.

"It's not that far of a stretch. Old Palpatine was pretty good at making loosed souls swap bodies. Hell, he ended up killing the guy he hired to design the Death Star so many times that getting popped by the New Republic was a relief. Me? I got blown up by this crazy Sithspawn bint in hyperspace not too long ago. All the power in the world can't save you from that sort of action."

"If you think I'm going to tell you that, you're off your rocker."

Eralam gave the Sith one of those little smiles that predators reserve for prey, right before the fuzzy little bastards take that last step too far. The drawl was a little more heavily accented at this point, a sure sign that the former Shard was agitated. He had expended the information he was willing to give this guy to keep him off his back, excepting one minor detail to be held in reserve unless absolutely necessary.

"If the Emperor ain't allowed to have a few secrets, then there's something seriously wrong with this picture. And if you haven't figured out the lay of the land yet, you and me are gonna have a problem."

Fitness nuts might complain about the bad juju that came with smoking right after a workout, but Eralam didn't much care. He pulled a cigarillo from a pouch on his belt and lit it with a gesture.

"Here's how this is gonna work. I care for your boss a lot more than I'm willing to admit even to myself at the moment. She in turn finds you handy to have around, otherwise you'd be a greasy smear on that bulkhead right about now. This means that me and you ought to reach some kind of understanding on the nature of our relationship before it goes off with a bang. You following so far?"

"Not so fast, buddy."

If it weren't for the rush of air, one might think the former Shard had teleported from the top of the crate to the doorway.

"I get it. It's your job to keep the Emperor on whatever the Sith version of the straight and narrow is called. That means you gotta keep her from getting soft, and I reckon you think little old me is gonna get in the way of that. Now you're a smart man, so you reckon you're gonna go around planting doubt and all that other shit you do so well. But know this: my tolerance for all that backstabby bullshit is at an all time low. Sin? She can fight her own battles. I'm not her knight in shining armor, and she can handle those guys on her own terms. But you? You've caught my attention."

Since the original cigarillo had been more or less obliterated, Eralam drew out another and lit it in the same way.

"Lemme get even a hint that you're trying that shit and I. Will. End. You."

The last four words were punctuated by what in the military is known as the knife hand, that is, all four fingers and thumb extended outward, jabbing towards Gorja's chest. There was no physical contact, but if all went well, it would feel like he was getting poked with each jab.

"Now I'm not a complete asshole. Keep yer plottin' and plannin' to yerself and I'll build you a gun that could make Abeloth herself think twice about pokin' her head around these parts. But I've only got about a year left in this world, and my patience is gonna be spread mighty thin."

By this point, Eralam's accent was so thick it was as if he had grown up a farmer in the Outer Rim. Having spent more time around soldiers in the last thousand years than not, and given that a disproportionate amount of them were farmers who grew up in the Outer Rim, he had originally adopted the affectation as a way of making the troops a little more comfortable. Much to his chagrin, it had a way of coming out when he was on the edge of losing his shit.

"Think about it this way, if that's what it's gonna take to get your tiny little brain to cope: Me and Sin, we're gonna get awful close. Hell, I'm already half convinced I'm fallin' for her, and given the shit I've been through, that ain't no easy trick. So you gotta ask yerself, what's gonna happen to her when I kick the bucket?"

It was then that Eralam knew he screwed up. How bad was impossible to tell.

He had known telling the Sith about his death clock was a risk, but it was a calculated one. If the bastard realized what it would mean for Sin when the former Shard bought the farm, he'd surely leave them alone. Hell, he'd probably encourage them to get close, because the closer they got, the harder it would be on his precious Emperor when he died. Loss was pain, and to a Sith, pain is power.

It was a calculated risk on his part to tell Gorja that he was going to die, and it looked like it had paid off. That wasn't the mistake. The mistake went back further than that. The mistake was coming here in the first place. No, the mistake was letting his friendship with the one person he never had to lie to, one of a few people he could never bring himself to hurt, take this new, more intimate turn. Because when it was all said and done, he was a dead man, and surely losing a drinking buddy would hurt less than losing a lover.

He had known that on an intellectual level. It was simple math, right? But it hadn't sunk in until now, because until now, he had no frame of reference. Losing Major had hurt, but a part of him had expected it. He had thought he loved her, and maybe he had. Maybe he still did. But there was that voice, the one that came from the human side, that whispered that what they had wasn't really love. It was Stockholm Syndrome.

But as Gorja spoke, something had raged inside the fallen Whill, and not just because the slimy little bastard got on his nerves. It was the realization that this particular slimy little bastard might be the reason he lost her, and that terrified him. Was that the same fear she felt when he said he was going to die, when he accepted it without question?

If that was the case, Eralam realized, he was the real bastard of the piece, a monster who used his friend for comfort, but would leave her alone and hurting in the not too distant future, and the thought of that broke his heart.

No.

Fuck.

That.

If that was the cost of dying, well, it was too goddamn high. Enough of this "I'm ready for the end" bullshit. Eralam was gonna stare down the Reaper and throat fuck him with his own scythe, and anyone who got in his way was gonna wish their mom had flushed after she squirted them into the toilet. He was not going to put the woman...He was not going to put Sin through that, no matter the cost.

From the sound of her breathing, Sin was still awake when he got back to her quarters. He dropped the gunbelt on the table, marched back into the bedchamber, and kissed her with a ferocity that surprised even him.

"So this whole dying in a year thing? So not gonna happen. We're gonna find a way to beat this."