Private I Don't Wanna Be Me

[Emryc]

He'd managed to light his cigarette as they walked, minding his pace so she could keep up, and making no misstep as she uttered her admission into his mind.

"Then don't."

A very simple Emryc Qosta answer.

 

[Beatrice Govan]

Oh.

That was an option?

---​

As it turned out, her view of psychiatric help was incredibly stereotypical and outdated as it was less an interrogation about her father upon a chaise lounge and more, well, more like an informal chat.

Beatrice's cynicism didn't exactly melt in the face of the (prettier, how dare he) Togruta, who was, at the very least entirely professional. The blonde kept expecting some sort of metaphorical rug to be pulled out from beneath her as she inched towards truthful assessments of her own mess of tangled feelings and issues over the weeks.

Perhaps there would always remain a part of her waiting for the next demise at the hands of another.

She didn't come leaping into the realm of absolute victory with a fully functional brain and healthy coping mechanisms after a couple of weeks, but it was a notable improvement upon where they had started (even if where they had started was in a very peculiar hole of minor self-harm).

A solution for her chronic case of overthinking came in a suggestion of keeping occupied, and since only so many hours of the day could be spent drinking soup and in therapy (both physical and mental), it fell to Govan to find something to do. This in turn meant that it fell to Emryc Qosta to give her something to do.

And as luck would have it, Emryc Qosta had five space stations worth of something to dos. Of course, there was an entire awkward semi-interrogation to ensure that she was even fit for purpose when she had asked him. One assurance of past experience and a small lie of omission later and she had a...

...job?

---​

Then it happened.

Evelynn Dorn, drinking electric orange cocktails (maybe Cortez had a point) and indulging in ringside violence happened upon on Aver Brand, arsehole mercenary and more-to-the-point, Emryc Qosta's darling sister. The evening unravelled into a mess of personal questions and self-realisation that was so horrific and vulnerable that the woman felt as if she was cheating on her psychiatrist with the marble-carved sibling.

A haze had descended on the rest of the evening, reckless inebriation stealing memories and leaving wicked headaches in its wake. She, at the very least, recalled two important parts.

One: That Emryc Qosta had a morally questionable sister that he would not think twice about shooting in the back of the head.

Two: That she actually cared about him.

The return trip back to two-forty-four Core was spent largely in a state of nausea, both relating to revelation and hangover. She napped upon the floor, hugging the metal of a toilet seat until it was warm and stuck to her cheek, legs that touch more useless since the reappearance of Evelynn.

No more drinking, she decided there and then.

 

[Emryc]

Unlike Beatrice Govan who was enduring the experience of a rather unusual turn of events in her life, Emryc Qosta had been busy learning how the fuck to manage 5 space stations scattered across the known galaxy. While Beatrice was busy exploring her own shortcomings and faults, Emryc was studiously poring over figures, numbers, and endless lists of maintenance, logistics, and supply needs. There was simply too much for one man to take in all at once, especially one that had never had such a wealth of money at his disposal before. He would need to visit and assess each station individually to decide what to do with them.

At no point did he ever consider just reselling them, as Cortez so flippantly suggested one afternoon while shadowing his office couch with her pithy presence. Emryc wasn't a man that turned from a challenge, nor was he a quitter. One couldn't afford to do either on Nadir because both options generally ended with your brains splattered over the pavement.

He was just reaching the decision to delegate these tasks to his other trusted employ when Beatrice came a-callin'. For a job. Well at least she was making moves to take control of her own life, but that didn't stop him from putting the woman through a job interview. Emryc decided that while his gut was telling him this was probably a bad idea, he'd throw the woman a bone.

After all, wasn't that how he'd ended up as Pa's Informant? The old bear had thrown him a bone just to see what he could do with it. At this point he wasn't convinced he had much to lose on a bad gamble with her considering the stations were already a worse gamble in and of themselves.

Emryc threw her the bone.

Some time later...

"Your wife's back," Zib strode into his office with a long, lanky, and lazy stride, trailing smoke and setting a gleaming glimmer of gold in the peripheral view of his boss, "ahead of schedule."

Emryc glance up, a veritable shark in the water setting its sights on the bait his Second Hand had just thrown into the water. A stabbing gaze of frigid grey honed in on Zib, causing the man to pause mid-stride and rethink his entire day's worth of decisions with an unbecoming chortle. Just when it felt like the Boss was about to close in for a killing line, Emryc turned away and set his attention back on his work. More specifically, back on the schedule.

She was early.

He looked back at Zib. A questioning look. An expected look. A quickly-running-out-of-patience look.

"Oh, you want me to bring her here - sure thing, Big Guy. On my way."

 

[Beatrice Govan]

Beatrice had internally gone through a vast array of imagined conversations between Emryc and herself during transit. Most of these figments seemed to devolve into a one-sided argument, with her mentally screeching throughout his head like some feckless, overly-passionate banshee from the nether.

Some of the scenarios played out in a surprisingly tender fashion, with solemn yet earnest truths finally acknowledged after all this time of constipated, honour-bound secrecy. A great, imaginary weight lifted off of her chest as she pondered more positive outcomes, fleeting as they may have been as mere speculation.

In other rehearsals, he just answered 'okay' to every single thing she said and it ended with her launching a crystal tumbler directly into his face.

Govan's pessimistic soul believed that outcome was the most likely.

When Zib sought her out and escorted the blonde to her husband's office the woman still ran through mental strategies, making internal last-minute promises to herself that no matter what happened, she wasn't to get frustrated and cry. It was horrifying that such promises had to be made, she was far removed from the jaded cripple who had first arrived here.

Nodding on auto-pilot at whatever witty banter Zib was making, Beatrice decided that she would go for a gentle approach, not wishing to ambush a man who had the emotional depth of a spoon with several grand revelations and truths.

No sooner had she entered his off-

I met your sister.

 

[Emryc]

Not but three seconds after the word sister left Beatrice Govan's lips did the bullet from the gun in his right hand desk drawer split the skull between her eyes, careen through her brain, explode out the back of her head, and paint the doorway with her excessively convoluted thoughts.

.
.
.
.
.
.


At least, that's what would have happened several months ago.


Emryc, instead, sputtered into his sip of coffee and watched with great annoyance as drops pattered across his desk and shirt. White shirt. His brow furrowed as he set the cup aside on a coaster and reached into his pocket for a handkerchief to wipe up the mess. His expression remained inscrutable - ever the statue purposefully carved with the look of furtive displeasure at its own existence - as he mopped himself up best he could. The shirt was ruined.

Let's not sugar coat anything. His entire day was ruined. Anything remotely having to do with the topic of Aver Fucking Brand could be used to spoil just about every topic of conversation he could think of. Someone more emotionally mature than him would tell him it was his own fault he gave Aver Fucking Brand so much authority over such things, but he couldn't be bothered to give the conversation the time of day.

If he had his way, Aver Fucking Brand would never come up in discussion ever. Including right fucking now.

"You're early," he said with the same grim discontentedness one would expect from the words you're late, "where is your report?"

 

[Beatrice Govan]

Emryc Qosta actually physically faltered, if only for a brief second into his coffee and onto his desk and white shirt. Beatrice was willing to take the blame for the sudden ambush of revelation that she had inflicted upon him.

The silence was painful, time stretching out beyond all meaning as she witnessed him methodically set aside his cup and make an attempt to clean up the minor mess, his face the usual soulless automaton during the entire ordeal.

At long last, he addressed her in tones that reprimanded instead of confronting and before Govan allowed herself to fall into unfortunate habits of self-doubt and internal questions she stepped forward.

Forget the report.

Her features knotted in a blend of frustration and concern, she was hardly a natural in the field of emotional stability but at the very least the blonde had been trying.

Just talk to me, tell me what you're thinking, please.

 

[Emryc]

That slate-faced stare, growing colder and more detached by the second, watched her unblinkingly as she approached.

Forget the report.

His eyes narrowed a dangerous fraction.

Just talk to me, tell me what you're thinking, please.

The man's lips pressed into a thin line, the cut of his jaw drawing taught as he weighed his options. The problem was that options in this family, at this capacity of dealing with inner turmoil, weighed heavily one-sided.

"I'm thinking," that he was very much trying not to treat Beatrice Govan the same way he treated all his other employees. Why? Not even Emryc knew.

"That I would very much like to have your report to review."

 

[Beatrice Govan]

No.

Beatrice could feel that frustration beginning to bubble, sitting molten atop her chest like a weight that pressed deeper every single time she drew breath. She fought herself to keep calm, and it was only under the advice of Aver fucking Brand that she managed.

Something about animals and patience.

You're going to open up to me, she spoke plainly, placing uncovered hands, one pale and one golden down upon his desk, and I'm not leaving until you do.

He wasn't leaving either, but that seemed actively threatening.

 

[Emryc]

That glint in her eye might've moved mountains for her elsewhere, but Emryc wasn't budging. Something about unstoppable force meeting immovable object. The only thing she was succeeding at was forcing him to batten down the hatches even more tightly. He would have forcibly slammed the doorway to his mind on her, but frankly he didn't have the patience for her tap-tap-tapping on a datapad to speak.

Also he didn't feel it was an appropriate time to reveal that particular hand.

"I don't have a sister," he leveled on her in a tone of finality, "leave your report and go."

 

[Beatrice Govan]

Beatrice Govan was not a psychologist nor a therapist, at best perhaps a former surgeon in terms of medical professions but physically cutting his cold and callous frame open would hardly be conducive to emotional progress.

Stop.

Her hands balled on his desk as she wrestled every instinct she'd ever known to just react and lash out. All she wanted to do was scream, but instead what she did was try.

Why won't you tell me? What are you so afraid of?

 

[Emryc]

What was he so afraid of.

Briefly his mind cycled back to a shared moment on Pa Qosta's balcony with Aver Brand.

"Are you afraid of me?" Aver asked, lazy blue smoke billowing out between her lips.

A breath passed - slow and steady, the practiced and controlled ease that kept him under the radar. It took a stillness to fake the confidence he didn't have while doing what he did. He'd learned early that you didn't show fear, no matter what, even if it ran through your veins like boiling water.

Violently racing heart,

furious internal screaming,

deathly steady hands.

Couldn't stop an enemy from taking over your position if you couldn't aim your gun right between his eyes.

He could hide it from most. Qosta knew and maybe just humored him, or maybe he really was a sick and twisted man not to care. Aver, it seemed, wasn't so easily fooled, but it was as much a part of his daily life as breathing and blinking. He doubt it would change any time soon.

"Isn't everyone?" words spilled out with smoke and a short glance in her direction. Wasn't that how the game went?


"No," she replied at length.

"But you… you stink of it, Emryc, and it's going to kill you." A beat, a knife-like smile.

"More sure than I could."

Well, he wasn't dead yet.

"Leave it alone, Bea."

 

[Beatrice Govan]

Beatrice didn't budge, not from the front of his desk nor from her determination to get something tangible out of the unfeeling brick of a supposed person that sat opposite.

Was that a threat?

No, I won't, she replied blunt and steadfast, so you might as well talk to me.

 

[Emryc]

The calmness of his expression did not even touch upon the veritable boiling of his blood. He was, for the first time that he could ever recall, growing angry with Beatrice. Anyone else, absolutely anyone else - Zib, Cortez, Ryger - would have already felt the brunt of this anger in physical form.

Somehow Beatrice Govan was getting spared.

Emryc stood from his seat, powered down his desk and the various holo-projected screens in the air above it, and moved with level intent to leave his office.

 

[Beatrice Govan]

As Emryc moved so did Beatrice, unabashedly afraid of obstructing his attempt to flee a confrontation with his past. Her stride was purposeful, jaw set in barely tempered frustration borne from the man that refused to let her in.

Even when she had let him into her past; he'd even helped burn it to the ground.

Patience, indeed.

Why won't you tell me, Emryc?

 

[Emryc]

"Because I've already burned down my past!"

The furious snarl erupted into the office at a decibel he'd not been made to use in a very long time, the heat of his anger roiling as the color of threatening storm clouds in his eyes, "And I am not digging through the ashes of it. Let it go, Bea, I don't want to hurt you."

She was making this extremely difficult - the whole, leaving without causing her bodily harm thing. What was curious and what he was presently completely overlooking, was just how spry she was on her feet right now. He'd never seen her move so quickly and without her cane, even. But he wouldn't recognize the progress standing, unaided, in front of him for all the red she was making him see.

 

[Beatrice Govan]

His outburst came crashing through the cold, callous front like the eruption from a long-dormant volcano and while Beatrice was taken aback, it felt more like progress than anything else. At least with anger, she knew that he felt something.

Even if it was directed at her.

She forced herself to step over the sentiment of his threat for both of their sakes and remained resolution in obstruction, her arms folding across her chest to show that she wasn't going anywhere. Not even if he hurt her, with words or with violence.

I won't let it go, she replied, refusing to raise her mental voice in kind, you need to confront this, or it'll only keep festering.

Festering like five fucking space stations.

Let me help you.

 

[Emryc]

Like the strike of a viper her jaw was on his hand, a nearly bruising grip of controlled anger, drawing her in and up into the grimace splitting over his face, "This isn't about me," he seethed, lips peeling back to reveal the sharpened and lethal teeth of a predator, "it's about you. It's always been about you."

He stared down at her, piercing gaze bleeding the war going on inside. How easily she'd triggered him, how desperately he wanted to end this conversation with her neck snapped in his hands, and the great fiend of burgeoning care he had for her holding that need back. Emryc's struggle was chaotic, but his hand was as steady as a glass-surfaced pond under the serene light of a moon.

A breath, the calm slowly pooled over his expression again, his grip on her jaw loosened.

"You don't need to help me."

 

[Beatrice Govan]

The moment his hand was upon her she felt the rise in her chest, that great primal craving that wanted nothing more than for his hand to squeeze and for the next sound to be shared between them the gradual crack of bone. The sensation was there for a single breath, a flash of the eyes that begged for him to just fucking do it.

It would have been so easy, to just give up and resign herself to the old familiar cycles of abuse and abusers. Could have destroyed this fucking room in one night of old habits and with it everything they had been working towards for the past...

...fuck, how long had they even been doing this?

No.

She closed her eyes and took a reprieve of her own, her sharp features taken by bitter melancholy when lids re-opened and emeralds stared back into solitude.

I don't need to help you, Emryc, she conceded, stepping aside so that he could take his leave from both her and the still-smouldering wreckage of his past, I want to help you.

No time like now.

Because I care about you.

 

[Emryc]

I don't want your fucking help.

The words were on the tip of his tongue but he didn't say them. Emryc Qosta had grown up a survivor of Point Nadir without anyone's help. As a matter of fact, those that had been dumb enough to offer help usually ended up burned as a result. Like the one pleb who'd helped him steal his buy-in for Clan Qosta...

"This is it, isn't it? This is what we need to earn in. Archon can't turn us away this time, this is serious shiit. We'll be Qostas, real Qostas and won't nobody mess with us. Daskin Qosta has a nice ring to it, I think I'll get it engraved on my first blaster. Alright, let's split it up here before we go….the feth you think you're doing Emryc? We were supposed to split the shipment - that was the deal. Give me my half! What are you doing…? Emryc….!"

No such thing as friendships within the grunts. Every scrap is life or death. Sure, it's easier to hunt in the pack, but when earning in is on the line you can bet they'll swipe every ounce of credit they can get for themselves. Ruen was no different. He'd already been that guy. He'd already been burned. Twice. Six years as a grunt does things to you, makes you desperate, makes you mean. This other grunt had been around for a while, but not as long as Ruen. He still trusted and that was his own damn problem. Maybe running him down with the speeder had been a bit much but Ruen was far too high on adrenaline to really feel that twinge of guilt.

Maybe he would later.

Not likely.

He still, to this day, did not feel a single twinge of guilt.

Yet the words Because I care about you surfaced even more deeply nested memories of the only other people he'd ever heard them from; his mother and Senra. The former had her son ripped away from her at the ripe young age of 9 only for him to return not just once, but two times nearly twenty years later to enact heinous assault upon her because his Boss commanded him to. Senra? He'd found her broken, abused body cold and limp in an alley. Three years lost beneath black, blue, red, and purple. She'd felt so much heavier in his arms lifeless and inert than she ever had alive, breathing, caring. He'd spent nearly his entire savings to have her cremated and so clearly remembered the feel of her ashes slipping through his fingers as he released them on the artificial wind that chugged smog and stale air through the Nadir skyway.

He deeply regretted later on not saving her ashes to spread across a planet like Dantooine. She would have liked it there.

Emryc lightly curled his empty fingers and withdrew his hand from where it had previously held her by the chin. He had no words. None. It wasn't a quietude of shock or disgust, but deep contemplation. Report all but forgotten.

His stare broke, his feet moved, and Emryc made his way without hurry to the office entrance where he stamped the button for the lift with his thumb, "I fixed your shotgun."

 

[Beatrice Govan]

She blinked, perplexed as usual by yet another Emrycism made at only the most inappropriate of times. Did it have meaning? Was fixing that old gun a euphemism for something else? Or was a fixed shotgun really just a fixed shotgun?

Aver was right, it really was another language

Beatrice made her way over to Zib's couch and took what felt like a world of weight off as they waited in silence for the elevator's arrival. Patience meant that it would be more than one horrendously strained conversation like that, in fact, she imagined that there would be several more instances like this to be endured as she silently observed his form.

That was okay, she didn't mind.

As the man got in the lift she looked to his face, ruminating on everything that had brought them to this moment and as the doors begin to close Beatrice decided to break a promise.

My real name is Evelynn Zambrano.