Balmas

Breathless Dead

It would be preferable if comprehension dawned like the sun--if a wave of light had broken the horizon, clearly illuminated the untrod paths of thought, and all she had to do was walk them to their conclusion.

Alexa can't help but feel that comprehension is coming like trench warfare.

All around her, dogs huddle and press for attention. Has she pet that one yet? She's sure there was one with that pattern, but was it fuzzy or metallic?

And isn't that just proving Cerberus's point? She wants to say that they could be equals. They could give her pets, and she could want them. What's stopping them from creating something she could find useful?

But already, she can feel the lie dying in her throat. They can be equals, yes. But only if she wants them to be. Only as long as she tolerates them. Only as long as she lowers herself to be like them, or raises them to be like her. Equality, but only on her terms.

Surely power to kill isn't the only metric? Power to give? Power to use? But what else is power good for, if not to push yourself onto the world? What is power, robbed of its teeth?

The dog metaphor makes it harder to swallow, somehow. She knows better than to pit herself against the gods. She had front row seats on what pitting yourself against the gods got you, thanks much for the reminder.

But to sit and have someone--have a dog--tell you that the only way you can bargain with the gods is by being cute--

But is it wrong?

She's seen the philosophers. Seen the amount of state-sponsored work, all to uncover whether the rituals are wrong. Whether maybe, there's a better way. Arguing with each other, arguing with leaders, arguing for change, for greater purity of understanding.

The ceremonies. The rituals. The rites, the prayers. All, nothing more than clever tricks to please indulgent masters?

It would…

She's staring at nothing in particular, fingers working mechanically with the force of thought.

It's galling, to have it put in her face like this. The gods don't need anything from them, from servitor, from human. They never have. Why does the sun shine brighter when offered this than that? Why does Poseidon grant passage through his waters to some, and not others? They don't need to be worshiped. The gods will continue without them, and have done for eons.

She stares at the neon around them, at the advertisements promising to bring the gods to heel if you just invest wisely. Suddenly, she can all too easily see herself in those same ads. Offer this to Zeus for favor in kingship. Perform this augury to divine the will and favor of Athena in battle. Pay the gods, and they will pay you in return.

And all along, arguing from false premises.

"No wonder those in power want things to stay the same," she croaks.

Breathless Dead

Alexa lets out a most undignified snort of a chuckle.

"Of course they want the past to last forever. That's when they won."

Because the dog isn't wrong. She'd told herself, for two hundred years, that she knew exactly what she was. That she could never be anything else. She was the point of a spear, hammered to shape, sharpened to a razor's edge. She told herself it until she believed it, until suddenly finding out that she wasn't all but shattered her to the wind. She had to fall so she could find out what pieces were left.

And she, only one woman. Only one mind's worth of ego, of inertia, of unwillingness to pick up pieces long shattered. How much worse for an empire? How hard could an empire cling to that self image? How much rot and decay could set in because fixing it would mean acknowledging how bad things had become? How many crews could come here before Nero had to acknowledge her own desperation?

Two hundred years and change of heroes. Her own daughter...

Idly, her hands explore the dogs--dig behind ears to find that one spot to melt a dog, see how many legs she can make kick with a single belly rub. It's the perfect activity to let her fingers do while she ponders.

"I am curious," she says, slowly, sounding out each word as if preparing for the words to bite, "what your alternative is.

"Not to the affairs of empires. To that first bit, about bargaining with gods as they were. You talk as if you know a better way. And you are old enough that I could believe it.

"Were the power difference not so vast, I could believe that you could learn and grow with them. You could spend time with them. Learn of them. Find joy in their laughter. Know them, know what they want, as lovers do. How else could you know them as they changed? How else could you be familiar with them, to know their moods?

"The gods love, of course. And mortals may even love them back. But can there truly be a relationship so close between the two, when one side bears all the power?"

Breathless Dead

Which head does she talk to? Does it even matter, if they're all the same? Does it matter, then, if the same being speaks differently through different heads?

Slowly, Alexa lowers herself to sit on the stairs next to the dogs. To inspect them, to marvel at them, to line them up, profile for profile, against Rusty, and wonder. Same model, maybe? Similar series, certainly. Submodel, perhaps, or an earlier breed.

Without any of her own input, her hands dig in her bags, and come out with a wire brush and a small bottle of oil. She's always done her best thinking with her hands, and surely, one of these good dogs will want brushies.

"If you'd asked me that even a year ago, I wouldn't have hesitated to say yes," she admits. "Of course we know better now than you did then, of course we know what the gods want and how to appease them."

You, the one always sighing. You want brushies, don't you? Yeah, you do. Look at those mournful eyes. C'mere, let's get you cleaned up.

"But then I found out that the reason Hermes hasn't been seen for two hundred years is because I was guarding her daughter. And the Hermetics might have known, and still don't know what she wants?

"And let's not forget that Athena is, apparently, dead. And has been for centuries? And the only reason I found out was because the new war goddess showed up to kill her? And I don't even know her name, let alone what she wants."

Best steer clear, all things considered. Make due offerings if needed, but never draw attention. Bad enough when Athena was her mom, last thing she wants is to make friends with the new one.

"And Beljani was running around with a sword that Bella pulled from… somewhere. Because somebody we don't know answered a prayer.

"So, maybe we're a bit smarter about it. Maybe we benefited from the mistakes your age made. But it's still surprising to be so old and find how little I might actually know."

Breathless Dead

The Tunguska should have been called the Hubris.

How many planets were destroyed to create this? How many worlds, siphoned of resources, stripped mined to the core, all for this monument to vanity? She knows the answer for the Spear--knows how many resources were spent in its sky-blotting construction--and this at least matches that in size.

All for a branch office.

A branch office. A portable bank, coming straight to your door, secure in its readings, confident in its orbital calculations, barren of offerings to see them safe through the void.

It's a temple to avarice, a monument to personal achievement, an enormous, hubristic emblem of glorious, wasteful consumption. Look how much money I have. Look what a building I can afford to construct. Behold my works, ye mighty, and despair.

Pay no heed to the gods. Offer them no sacrifice--not unless they prove themselves, not unless they pony up, not unless they come to the bargaining table and offer some genuine quo for our quid. Fight them as you would any other enemy, force them to surrender to your might, slaughter Poseidon's children as you would the other species you've brought to extinction.

Their hubris would be terrifying, if it weren't so pathetic. To invoke the gods in the name of, of selling kitchen knives?!

The Tunguska is a monument, still, but from the other side of the table. See what they built. See how they thought.

See what we did to them.

She stalks the corridors, confronted at every corner by the neon mistakes of the past, and wonders how it must feel to be so confident, and so fatally, terribly wrong.

Breathless Dead

"You don't have to do this," she says severely.

Those are the rules, after all. This is a ritual, a humiliation, a celebration. And her role is to feign anger, no matter how her eyes crinkle at the corners, or how no-one can quite keep the smiles from their eyes.

She bounces from one set of arms to the next, and at each interchange, she reminds them that this is quite unnecessary, really, all of you, this isn't needed. And everywhere, people nod, and smile, and pass her along.

She's pretty sure she wasn't wearing a hat before, but there it is on her head--and without missing a beat, she grins at Arth'na, already swooping down on a fresh victim. Great progress she's making, Alexa notes. The young Alcedi asn't earned enough for a hermetic treatment, but already Arth'na's training is showing in the extra turn of speed, the litheness of motion, the--Alexa grins--the presence of more than one set of eyes on her.

"Not necessary," she calls, and can't keep the laughter out of her voice.

She bounces from arm to arm, noting with delight the progress being made, before finally bouncing into Ramses. Big bear hug, physical lift, and squeeze--and then with a whoop of surprise and laughter, she's lifted into the air and find's a spot on the shoulders of Iris, who is making fantastic strides on her apparent goal of being a living crane.

It's all she can do to keep a straight face, looking at all the faces out for her. But, she makes a heroic effort at a poker face as she lectures Ramses.

"You didn't have to do all of this just for me," she insists, cheeks tight with repressed smiles.

But oh, after so long staring out the windows, and maneuvering a ship the size of a city through the eye of a needle, and all under the oppressive pink glow…

They didn't have to do this. Which makes it mean so much more that they did.

Breathless Dead

Alexa takes the time to consider it--really imagine it. Ships, traveling between planets like sparks between points of light. Of machines, long dead, now spinning to life again. The galaxy, healing, living, as once it did before.

Gently, she strokes Dolce's fluff, seeing it in her mind.

No, no, not like it did before. Not as it does now, with each niche carefully built and filled by perfection. Mice and sheep built for service, ordained to be a product. Kaeri and Alcedi, destined to throw themselves gladly on the spear of other's dreams. Ranks of uniform masked scavengers, tearing apart ships and recycling them together. Constant iteration, all to fill the engine room with only those perfectly suited for the task.

A mix. Something new. Freedom to choose to work where they please, or not at all.

Freedom to travel. Lights zipping through Two hundred years of entropy and stagnation, ending in an explosion of culture. People, trapped in cycles of oppression, discovering new places, new ways to think.

Atlas, torn apart, scavenged for parts, and put together again. Not in search of perfection, in subsuming efficiency, in lives given in support of empire, but in impossibilities of expectations defied and redefined.

A world where the idea of being defined by your position is laughable.

"It's a good wish," she admits, and she can't keep the longing for that future out of her voice. Freedom--not just for her, but for everyone. Real freedom, the kind that can't be won individually.

She doesn't say it's worth it. It would be, absolutely. But it's not her wish. It's not her journey. She can't cross this rift for you.

Breathless Dead

Alexa was created ill-prepared for this. Molech did not teach her to hear the unspoken, or feel the quiet heartbreak. She was not meant to shed tears, or hold the grieving, or fold the hurt into her arms where she can whisper quiet words. It's gonna be okay, Dolce. We're gonna get through this, Dolce. Things will get better, Dolce.

Every word, a dagger through herself. Every word a lie.

Quietly, she rocks, back and forth.

She's hurting them. She's hurting them, and she can't stop, and she's hurting herself.

She's going to have this conversation over and over again. Which would be easier to do--no, that's a fucking lie, every one will be harder than the last--if she knew what she could even say.

Rocking. Holding him, she realizes, like a comrade she's never going to see again. Like a fallen comrade, still warm, but going oh so cold. A comrade, soon in the ground, never to be talked to again, because after this point, they will be dead, and she will be gone.

"I didn't want to come on this trip, initially." She has no idea what she's saying. No plan, no perfect sentence planned out. She doesn't know where this goes, but... She looks up at the warm face under the hoodie, and dares to hope. Maybe it will be alright. Eventually.

"I had no choice," she hesitantly continues, and buries her face in the wool. She's hurting you, she's hurting her, and maybe if she can hug hard enough, she can say sorry enough. "Redana--you know."

"But Hades--he offered a wish. And I still didn't want to be here. But I at least had an idea. A hope that--maybe, if the stars aligned, and the gods were willing, and we survived--maybe, just maybe, I could be my own. That I could be something other than what I was.

"And now I... I am. Somehow.

"I was sure, beyond doubt, that only an act of the gods could change me."

No, it was them. All of them, telling her, over and over again, that it was okay to be herself.

"But now that I can be who I am... I don't want to lose that."

She squeezes him tighter. Never is an awfully long time to lose a friend.

"Given the option of crossing the rift--maybe losing all of that progress, of losing all of my memories, of losing things I can never get back--or staying here..."

Gods, she's going to lose them.

She's quiet, rocking, holding him in her arms, listening to the hurt she's doing and wishing she could stop.

"... You know, Dolce, I don't think you've ever told me what your wish was. I know what Vasilia wants. And Dany's probably horrifically noble and self-sacrificing. But you? What waits for you, if you decide to cross? Is it worth it?"

Breathless Dead

Slowly, lulled by the soothing voice, the waters subside and drain away. The flood has passed, but what emerges from beneath the water is different--thoughts rearranged, put into new shapes, all molded by a soothing voice.

Alexa closes her eyes, and presses her face against the wool once more.

"Then… I don't know whether I can cross the rift, Dolce."

She's all cried out, she thought. And yet, somehow, she can still feel more tears pricking at the corners of her eyes.

"Your love--yours and Vasilia's. That's a living love. You're so different, but you fit together so well. More than that, you've built bridges where you don't."

She squeezes extra hard--reassurance, the best way she knows how to give. You two will survive this.

"But the love I have for myself… I love myself, now. Genuinely. But that's new. I'm better than I ever have been because of those choices. But the seed's only been planted. It needs time to grow.

"And the love I have for others…"

Carefully, she pulls one arm free of the wool, and pulls the battered scraps of pages towards herself.

"There are people I love who. Who aren't around, anymore. If we make it back--if, miracle of miracles, we survive this, and come back across--then I. I still won't be able to make new memories with them.

"The only place those loves can keep growing is on this side of the rift."

Breathless Dead

Nobody considers how it feels to be a dam.

And why would they? Behold the mighty face, the invincible buttresses. Relax by the placid, mirror-smooth lake. Enjoy the benefits of living nearby, of the mills and pumps of the tempered river. This is a home, a place of safety in the shadow of the dam.

And if the dam strains to hold back the water, that's alright. Downriver, just in sight, the dam sees them living and playing. People are counting on you to hold back the water. And if the water rises, and the strain increases, that's fine too. And if cracks start to form, you just need to hold together harder--people are counting on you. You can't be seen to be cracking, it'll cause panic.

And so the cracks grow, and the water rises to drown forest and village, and you tamp it down, because people need you--

Right up until the moment a too-small sheep with a too-large heart puts a hand on a crack, and tells the dam it's okay to break.

Even now, she tries to hide it, but the signs are too strong to ignore. The hug--at first, so gentle, folding you into her arms as if moving too fast might shatter this moment--now clings desperately, like a shipwreck survivor hugging a broken piece of ship. The hitches of breath, so shallow at first, are now wet gaping sobs. And even if none of the above were true, it would still be impossible to miss the dampness of tears soaking into wool.

"I thought--snf--I thought he was sharpening me to hurt you."

You. Vasily. Dany. The ship as a whole.

"An' I. An' I can't tell how much of what he said is actually good. For me, I mean."

The thought is terrifying, and she squeezes harder.

"It's all. It's all so confusing. Because I. Aphrodite's fucked with my head, but i. I like who I am. Who that advice turned me into."

Quiet, for a few seconds. Even as her breathing calms, the tears continue, and she presses her face against your wool again.

"… I don't want to go back to who I was before. Not even the Pallas. Alexa… Before I met everyone, I. I didn't want to live. With who I was. With what I was.

"I didn't love me. I didn't love anyone, not after Minerva.

"And that rift terrifies me."

She sniffs messily, and lifts her head to reach for a napkin.

"I don't. I don't want to live inside that head again. If I forget everyone--if I forget you, and Dany, and Vasily--"

If I forget Minerva, is not said so visibly it practically echoes.

"--and everyone else… Then who's left? I can't guarantee, if I cross, that I'll be…

"What's left of Alexa, when I forget who I love?

Breathless Dead

The world falls away, here, in this moment.

Touch. Just touch. No expectations, no duty. Just care and affection, from one friend to another, because he wants to. Tenderness, gentleness, all wrapped in cleaning grit out of grooves

The world could end, and she could no more pull away from the small, dainty fingers than she could interrupt the not-quite-hopeful voice.

And she daren't look inside the hoodie, because she knows what she'll find.

She stares up at the larger hoodie behind him. Hestia. Hestia, please. Please tell her she can speak here, in this island you've created, this bubble of peace in a sea of roiling turmoil. What one god has done, no other god can undo. Here, in this kitchen, they are safe.

A small nod.

Okay.

"You don't believe he will."

Not a question. Not an accusation, either, a dart meant to sting. A simple statement of fact. You're hoping, yes. Hoping that there is some promise, some sacrifice you can make so that you will be spared this if you cross. You can bargain for your love. Somehow, you will be the ones.

"Aphrodite created this situation, Dolce."

He's stopped his gentle ministrations. Please, keep going. Please, forgive her.

"He burned the galaxy, slaughtered billions upon billions, sank half of Poseidon's seas and everyone in it into the underworld. He wanted all of us. Everyone, here in the underworld. All, just to hurt Zeus.

"He manipulated Molech. All of that, for the love of someone who never existed.

"He manipulated Zeus, to give humanity the tools to create the Spear.

"He manipulated Hermes and Hades--for the love of humanity, for the love of Persephone."

When next she speaks--when eons have passed, and somehow the world is still too terrible not to say it for her, spare her the grief--she's almost inaudible.

"He manipulated me, Dolce.

"All this time, I thought he was helping me. I thought he cared, maybe. Not a friend, no, but… He kept bringing me out of my shell. Showing me that I could make choices. That I could leave, and so could choose to stay. That I had people who loved me. That I could love myself.

"And all this time. All this time, he was the one to make sure that Minerva--"

She can't bring herself to say the words. The thought is too large, that she's gone. Well and truly. Not kidnapped, not vanished. He hadn't said those words.

"… All this time," she murmurs. "All this time, he just wanted a spear."