Private I Don't Wanna Be Me

[Emryc]

"You'll have to ask him that one," Zib replied, "that's his schtick, not mine."

 

[Beatrice Govan]

“Then maybe I will."

---​

For two entire days, she got to be steeped in moderate annoyance courtesy of Zib's uncontrollable mouth. Help people help themselves. What did that even mean? What did any of this even mean anymore? Oh, but of course, Mister Right-Hand man didn't have any kind of answer, no, that would have made the noise streaming out of his face somewhat valuable.

Thankfully, her tiresome fake husband did not succumb to rebar-related trauma, ensuring that Evelynn didn't have to go screeching back into the Nether to get some form of an answer.

Was this her own brand of worrying, caring even? Being irritated?

The moment that consideration hit was the moment that Evelynn decided to find him, as to truly get to the bottom of 'this schtick' and move on. It didn't take particularly long to track his broken-bodied whereabouts, her robotic-voiced interrogation of the lab technicians proving most effective as they stuck her body with regularly scheduled needles.

At this point, she had assumed that they were placebos.

It turned out that he was recovering right under her very feet, just an elevator ride away. Well, an elevator ride and a security detail. It was an awkward experience, as a professional silence accompanied careful deliberation when her arm was pinged by their scanners. What were they going to do? Take it off? The expression that Evelynn made when they had decided that she was not, in fact, a cyborg assassin playing the long con was that of a mother whose child had just sworn in front of all the other parents and their children.

Mortified yet seething.

She had planned on carrying that rage to his hospital bedside; she would charge in, lock eyes and say: what is your game here, Emryc Qosta?

But he was sleeping, and a part of her softened. As she stared at his unconscious face, his natural resting expression of misery and constipation mostly absent she couldn't help but think, what kind of fething idiot even lands chest first on rebar? It was a very small part that softened, enough that wouldn't forcibly wake him while he rested but not so much that she wasn't still frustrated.

Not being the standard sort of hospital designed for polite (or in this case irritated) visitors there was a severe lack of seating for the cripple, who sighed before hopping onto the empty neighbouring bed.

And so she waited.

 

[Emryc]

Wouldn't be too long of a wait. Emryc Qosta was a light sleeper out of a lifetime of habit formed into necessary survival instinct. He'd been pulled from his heavy slumber by the sounds of the scanners at the entrance of his doorway pinging Evelynn's special arm. The sound of her cane methodically tamping the floor alongside her (as of late) lighter footsteps told him who his visitor was. She'd never even see the shade of faded gold skin upon him for the silvering as he reached full awareness.

The silver was his mainstay and, more often than not, what gave him away as a Firrerreo. The skin color change was an easy tell, but the permanent sheen of steel was less so. Not too many other races in the galaxy with that color hide, fewer still with both nictitating eyes and inhuman regeneration.

He listened to her approach, felt her irritation permeating the immediate surroundings with a sourness like a rotten egg, and waited for her to make herself comfortable before deciding he'd grace her with his conscious presence.

"I can feel you glaring at me," the man murmured without opening his eyes.

 

[Beatrice Govan]

She was swithering on how to actually speak to the man when he woke up, however it would have seemed that he was already awake as if he had a sixth sense telling him that his frustrating presence and attitude was needed. An Emryc symbol flashing brightly in the grim sky of his mind.

Good.

She settled upon her glacial rake of telepathic tones, as the jarring automated voice that lacked inflection just was just too detached for such frustrations.

I met Zib.

It was a sentence that Evelynn allowed to just sit and settle for a moment, like a great turd of ill omen before the flush. She imagined that women informing Mr Qosta that they had 'met Zib' was never a perfectly harmonious occasion from her scant experience with the right-hand man.

Just what is your game, Emryc? Why me? Why all this effort, this expenditure, this time on me? Because you made a promise to some drunk stranger lying to you? Why not a worthy cause? Some tragic orphan or a crippled puppy? I don't understand, why me? The questions stepped out one by one as if they had been waiting patiently in the queue for this moment, hands gesturing as if the blonde was part Toydarian junk dealer.

What are you getting out of this?

 

[Emryc]

Those were a lot of questions. Emryc Qosta didn't even ask that many questions when interrogating people - he tried to hold himself to a maximum of two and he spent plenty of time deciding what the two most important answers were. Clearly this was not the case with Beatrice Govan, a woman who perhaps spent her entire life questioning why.

He knew she'd met Zib. His right hand man was his right hand man for a reason. Zib he could trust, he'd earned that much from him. Zib had also beaten her to the visit at his bedside, updating him on their prisoner ... among other things. But Emryc didn't need Zib to know these kind of questions were an inevitability with Beatrice. No, the woman had already shown her penchant for misgivings and questioning the way of things.

Why had never once helped him. Knowing why had never once brought him peace or comfort. Those sort of answers had a tendency to let people down because most people cling to a fantasy of what they think they should be and reality rarely ever held itself to such a mantle. Emryc's eyes slivered open, staring upwards at the intermittent shadows cast there from various blinking instruments at his station.

"If I answered all those questions, what would that change?"

 

[Beatrice Govan]

Well it would certainly offer some peace of mind!

Evelynn closed her eyes with a huff, her lower jaw protruding as she felt the heat rise in her chest, prickling alongside further frustration caused by the ever unsatisfying, blunt answers of Emryc Qosta. He was just so...

I am at your mercy and I don't even know who you are!

One second she thought she did and then the next it was like, no, he is an enigma wrapped in a mystery, blanketed in a thick layer of obfuscation. HeLpInG pEoPlE hElP tHeMsElVeS!

You have amassed a massive amount of wealth and yet your business leads you to impale yourself on rebar! Does that sound safe and trustworthy to you?

All it would take was a word, a nod to the security force and it was a trip to the firing wall. Or to the lab technicians, could have put anything in those syringes. She had to be so absolutely physically vulnerable around him and he got to remain a perfectly guarded mystery. Fists balled, shoulders hunched, teeth grit. She felt the fervour tingle where her shoulder met gold, burning like dusty old mantras were prone to.

Oh, but it's okay because he didn't care who she might have been.

You could be anything! We could...we could get to the end of all this and then it turns out that you want something more than a vientta-fucking-promise! That your rich boy hobby is building up sad, broken girls just so you can destroy them anew! How do I know, Emryc?! I don't! I just have to TRUST!?

 

[Emryc]

So many words.

Just like most of the people who were bent and broken under his hands, only her circumstances were arguably the best anyone under his purview had ever had. She had it better than Zib - Zib had to work for his luxury. All Beatrice Govan had to do was get better. Emryc looked over what getting better fully entailed only because anyone who had ever been sad and broken before, tortured and left to rot in their own excrement, knew that getting better involved a great deal many things.

Out of all the words she spoke, he suspected only a few were really valuable to her. The rest were simply along for the emotional voyage.

The man closed his eyes again, letting several moments draw out as he filtered the ephemeral through his mind. The transient waves of feelings pouring off the woman, breathing them in like a bad forming habit and releasing them as invisible smoke into the aether.

"You're not a sad, broken girl," he replied quietly but with the affirmation of someone very sure of their statement, "how long has it been since you returned to your home on Dantooine?"

 

[Beatrice Govan]

Oh, now he got to tell her what she was! How helpful! He pushed around her words on his plate, picking out only what he wanted to digest and giving back nothing but dishes laden with further grievance.

It was as if he wanted her to mad, wanted her to smash all the ridiculous little plates and see what thoughts and feelings were left smeared upon the floor.

Thirty-two years, she seethed into his skull with a slow burn sort of bile, and since you seem to be the authority on what I am, feel free to inform me, I'd love to know!

 

[Emryc]

"Sad, broken girls don't keep track of things like that," it was true, he was telling her what she wasn't only because he'd seen more than his fair share of deeply sad, irreparably broken women in his life. Nadir had a habit of filling the streets with them and it had taken him several years to learn that those sort of women weren't worth the salt, just the bullet. It was the greatest kindness he could provide to them.

"Would you like to?" his eyes opened again, but this time he tilted his head just enough to look aside at her, "Go back there."

 

[Beatrice Govan]

What?!

It was exactly this sort of behaviour that perfectly summed Emryc Qosta up. She wanted to know about who he was and so after a barrage of questions, he told her who she wasn't and offered a trip to her childhood home planet. It was such a maddening deflection.

She had frozen in place, staring at him as if he had just grown seven more heads that had suddenly started singing together a cappella.

I... yes? I don't know?!

A morbid curiosity called out to Evelynn, wondering if that old cottage still stood, if everything inside was preserved just the way she had left it, like a time capsule peering back into youthful innocence. In truth, she did want to go but the woman didn't want to particularly accept his offer at that moment in time.

The blonde felt a pattern emerging. She got upset and then he made it an expense.

Why?

 

[Emryc]

Again with the why.

"Why not," he offered in rebuttal. So often people like to forget about their origins. Not Emryc. The man would never be able to put from his mind the place he had come from. Being torn from it at eight years old by a father he'd never met, was told never to speak of, never to expect anything from. Perhaps that fateful afternoon put into motion all the domino effect tumblings that brought him here today. Perhaps if he'd been allowed to live out his life with his mother, things might've been utterly different.

A Seer told him he would have ended up dead in a ditch. Nothing more than Ruenni Thiir, the malnourished and skittish boy child of Lenda Thiir. Not even a Coathanger.

"Going back helps you to see how far you've come." His head tipped back into his pillow, eyes closing again to drown out the synthetic lights with darkness. "Also I think a break from this place would do us both some good."

 

[Beatrice Govan]

Or how far you've fallen.

You don't strike me as the type content to sit around in the grass all day.

And that was the bare truth of Dantooine. Miles and miles of savannah that stretched on for endless horizons at times. She had been born and raised there out of reason. It was dull, there was nothing there of real interest, civilisation caught few and far between.

Fine.

She gently slid off the neighbouring bed and onto her feet, her acceptance of his offer terse and still no less frustrated as she moved to leave. It wasn't as if the fact that he hadn't answered anything had evaded her thoughts, no, in fact, she was now more than ever aware of it.

When you've recovered.

Why was Emryc Qosta so reticent to talk about himself, and why couldn't he have just lied about it?

 

[Emryc]

Emryc had no idea if he was or wasn't the type to be content sitting around in the grass all day. He'd never seen of felt grass in his lifetime. For all he knew, the experience could be perfectly pleasant - and despite outward appearances and impressions, simple pleasantries weren't lost on the man of granite.

"Tomorrow, then," he responded to her last as she made her way out, "have your things ready."

~~~

En route to Dantooine.

"You ask a lot of questions," true to his word, Emrcy had recovered by the next day. Such were the perks of being what he was, though the scar tissue of the puncture wound would require further surgery to correct. For now, he was perfectly sound for an otherwise casual call across the stars. Even the Doctor thought a little vacation away from work would do him well.

Steely blue eyes leveled upon Beatrice Govan across the table. It was an hour before lunch and she'd found him in a back armory room working on one of his hobbies; repairing and refurbishing antique guns. Real guns, the kind that shot metal projectiles from point A to point B, typically rendering point B lifeless or at least well on its way. He was, for once, without his suit but wearing casual workout clothing - a white tank, black sweatpants. There were some grease stains. Truly he was the epitome of chiaroscuro.

"Where I come from, that gets you killed."

His eyes tracked her figure briefly, assessing her expression and her stance. The waves of empathic energy slowly rippling off her like a ward against the galaxy. Then his gaze shifted back to his work where his hands slowly and methodically began to disassemble the pistol within them piece by piece.

"Even speaking can do the same unless it is done with great care."

He laid out the pieces within a tray with care and detail to placement. Almost to the point of perfection - alignment and space between each. It was the method that kept him sane, isn't that what Aver said?

"Listening ..." the man dipped his head slightly to gesture to his ear with the point of the gun, "keeps you alive. But I realize that is difficult for you to do," there were several moments of silence following that statement that could have allowed anyone to misconstrue the meaning. That Beatrice Govan wasn't capable of listening or didn't want to. In those moments he carefully extracted several more smaller pieces and placed them on the tray.

"...when you have so little to listen to." And there it was, he was taking the blame. "So I will make you a deal."

"I will speak more if you will choose your questions more carefully."

 

[Beatrice Govan]

Somebody call the Dark Lord of the Sith, there's been a miracle in the Force.

Emryc Qosta speaking several sentences in a row (albeit between great, dramatic pauses). It was a rare moment that needed to be documented for the forthcoming holovid nature special on the 'greater reclusive twatbag.' Priceless footage, really.

Naturally, Evelynn was still frustrated.

She stood arms folded across her chest observing him as he... lectured her? It seemed like a lecture, which of course, was very impressive to the woman. All women adored being lectured by unfeeling automatons, especially on the merits of getting killed by a man who, not a few days ago, had broken a long fall with a chest full of rebar in the name of his business.

Then again, only one of them here had solid experience with dying. Was this now mansplaining? Because in Evelynn's experience, inflicting egregious human rights abuses on masses of people capable of an uprising was what gets you killed.

Suddenly, she wanted him to speak less, her jaw setting in callous irritation as he continued, fiddling away with an old slugthrower.

Eyes widened the moment that his words suggested that IT WAS HER, WHO WAS AT FAULT. WHO WAS THE ONE WHO FOUND LISTENING DIFFICULT?! She stared at him, jaw-to-the-floor with the same loathing she reserved for crayon-snorting Mandalorians, a slow deliberate inhale being drawn through her nostrils as he frittered away with bits and bloody pieces.

A rant was beginning to formulate, brewing like ominous tea before the man conceded some scant level of fault, somewhat deflating her rage and bringing it back down to a confused irritation.

Very. Well.

And then out of sheer spite, she did not follow-up with a question, instead choosing to do cane-assisted laps around the armoury, staring at his hands while he worked.

 

[Emryc]

And how immediate the shift was, it took even Emryc a bit by surprise. His gaze leveled with her for a moment, the scant raise of a brow the only sign of curiosity before she tracked beyond his peripheral and he relented the visual hold in order to return to his work. By the the time Evelynn reached the far end of the armory he had the entire gun pieced apart. Next in the process was the stripping of grime, dust, oils, and ... yep, blood. This clearly was a weapon that saw action.

Perhaps it had even seen action the day he made friends with the rebar. Hard to say.

The work, however, was so habitual. So perfectly practiced and nuanced, that he barely had to pay full attention to the process or the action. He went through the pieces slowly and methodically with as much familiarity that he might have done it with his eyes closed. In this, he could focus on other things. Sometimes it was working out difficult decisions in his mind, or replaying the memories of conversations he'd had. Trying to discover the secrets between the breaths.

Today, however, he was listening to the sound of Evelynn's progress through the room. The shuffle was less profound and there was a marked clip to her steps. Her cane pitched lower - she was putting less weight on it. Beatrice Govan was getting stronger, little by little.

"You are making progress," the man remarked after a drawn out length of silence, "that is good."

 

[Beatrice Govan]

It was difficult to say if whether the progress that she was making was in fact, progress in her ever-slowly recovering mobility or if it was in fact, an incredibly waspy backhander in reference to fewer questions being asked on her part.

It is indeed.

She still felt terse, not ready to turn around and relax into pleasantries about her own physical improvement, which made it all the more frustrating. It made the woman feel as if she was now being unreasonable, and it hadn't been the first time either.

A sigh, loud and dramatic as Evelynn chose to concede first, again.

I shall be conquering Doctor Cortez's assault course in no time.

Okay, there was a mild pinch of sarcasm.

 

[Emryc]

There did not exist a single person alive that could say they'd heard Emryc Qosta laugh and not be lying. But a curious hmmm sounded from his chest with an initial inflection that could have hinted to humor. Amusement. Something relatively positive.

"I look forward to seeing that," he'd not missed a session yet of Evelynn's attempts at the course. Each time he'd been there, observing from the sidelines. Sometimes accompanied by Zib who talked business while he listened, nodded or shook his head, and on the rare occasion spoke back. Truly, Beatrice was getting a chatty Emryc today.

"Though your cane has become a statement piece." It would be strange to see her without one on the day that she overcomes her physical difficulties.

 

[Beatrice Govan]

He made a noise, which either suggested a sense of humour or that his mechanical sense of being was malfunctioning and that the man was going to explode at any given moment.

Evelynn raised a solitary eyebrow as she continued her circuit, pondering a scenario in which the real Emryc Qosta had died and was replaced by a much more talkative droid replica. Unrealistic but not completely outlandish.

Yes, I've grown rather attached.

In reality, she would have to ditch the cane at some point, if only to further in her rehabilitation. She would have to reach the point of not needing a crutch before heading back to one for fashion's sake. After all, the cane industry wasn't only catering to cripples, there were perfectly healthy eccentrics among them too.

A pity I've not had the opportunity to whack somebody with it yet. It's got a good girth for whacking.

 

[Emryc]

"The Kath Hound cane is top heavy," Emryc remarked as he held up a piece of metal under a light, using a small brush to carefully clean casing dust from the grooves along the inside curve, "a good swing from the base would cave in a skull without too much trouble."

 

[Beatrice Govan]

She stopped in her tracks, tilting her head at Emryc as if he had just begun gnawing on his own toenails for sport. It wasn't that she didn't appreciate his casual murder advice, but it was unreasonably out of the blue and respectably blasé.

Oh, no no, not murder, just a good solid caning across the backside with the shaft.

After all, Evelynn was in possession of a solid gold murder arm that she opted to use as eating utensils when the mood struck her. Apparently, the apparatus was capable of turning people to ash in a blink but she preferred the optics of a good, solid soup spoon these days. Her life was going increasingly strange.

I was thinking of making Zib my target, or Cortez. I haven't quite narrowed it down yet. I would ask for your thoughts, but that seems a waste of a question.

Couldn't get too amicable, lest she lose all frustrated footing.