Compartmentalization (Seydon)

[Jorus Merrill]

[member="Seydon of Arda"]

"She always was one for getting compromises out of folks." He nodded thanks and cinched the bandages a little tighter. "You know how many insurgencies I've backed? And all against folks just like Tion and that crew. If she wasn't my sister, I'd have put a bullet through AEL's head and put a torch to the Tion Cluster. But I held back, always found enough targets elsewhere, and fethed if I didn't trade information with her once or twice when it mattered. Put my life's work on the line for her, you could say, and I'm still not sure I did right by those that counted on me."

With a grunt that bore a familiar resemblance to a groan, he headed up gantry steps toward the cockpit. Memory -- a Moross diplomatic corvette thrown into hyperspace sideways for trying to assimilate his home; a Star Destroyer losing its bridge before its reactor went supercritical -- mingled nostalgia and shame. "The things we do for family."

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]The tomahawk rose and peaked like a glinting, steely star in the blanketed sky. It fell, a comet in hurtling flight… Finding the meat and bone of the flesh across her heart, cutting through a single hack. Her right hand reached and gripped Seroth’s shoulder in a death throe, eyes wide and crying with pain. She tried to say something… But blood coated her tongue. He listened to her falling breaths, fading too fast. His mind blankly searched for something, anything to say…![/SIZE]

"Yeah," Seydon murmured. The brush-washed durasteel atop the galley table was mined with dented pocks and rips torn by errant action. Vibro-scars on the smoothed lip-edge, heat discolouration courtesy of a blaster score-mark, knuckle deformations, slug ricochets, and dozens of oily accidents. He could just make out a fog-dimmed reflection peering back up through tobacco-brown stains. There was remembrance of the Fang of Contruum... Dark ice lit by starlight, storms coasting over the bearded peak, fighting for breath. Fighting for purchase. Hands number than stone, his knees cut to bone. Roaring. A fight, too personal, axe to axe and with knives to their spare hands. Related blood coating stone in long arterial gouts. "The things we do for family."