Rid of Me
Audience Chamber, Throneworld
Throneworld always knew when its master was home.
Much to Cassilde's surprise, it was nothing so vulgar as an announcement; no, the colossal station simply shifted, like guards adjusting their posture, as the Alcyne did when she came in from Callamar's gentle mist. The Graspborn in the corridors stood a degree straighter, the servants walked faster, and the entire gaudy carcass of a place seemed to hold its breath. Was it awe? Was it fear? The Hapan found she didn't care; she didn't care beyond the fact that it was useful information.
So she went to her station, as she always did. In anticipation of the tyrant's needs, never, ever out of care.
Six months.
What a wretched six months.
When her fate was sealed, and her new station in life was passed down to her by a brutish hand that crushed the air from her throat, she had anticipated a great many things about what her life would be like. The Hapan had found, much to her dismay, that she was wrong about most of them. The people here were an assortment of the wretched and the royal. Cyborg vagrants alongside Queens, deviant psychopaths alongside nervous girls who bit themselves to cope. How funny, really, that the person Cassilde found most palatable was a 'dead' actress whose connection to her own sanity seemed tenuous at best.
But she had endured. She had waited. She was patient.
The doors of the audience chamber had been built for a larger ego than the one presently occupying them, which, quite frankly, was a spectacular feat, and the walk from them was long, the lights atrociously dim as they tended to be here, and her heels announced her across the floor like a herald with nothing kind to say. She did not yet look to the throne; there would be time enough for that later. Cassilde had yet to become accustomed to the abominable orgy of obsidian and gold, and for that she was glad; her taste remained intact.
Her station sat where it always sat, tucked away to one side among the pillars, where the decanters lived in company with the Empress' taste in drink. Kor Vella Black Seal. A private allocation of Corellian Whiskey, numbered bottles sealed in black wax and a waiting list as long as a Hapan grudge, all so that a woman with the palate of a gundark could throw it down her neck as if she were a docker with a pint of warm urine calling itself otherwise. It was a prestige drink, yes, but Cassilde had classified it on her first week aboard as somewhere between paint thinner and regret. Six months had revised a great many of her opinions on matters, but not that.
The glass could be touched, even if the bottle was not.
Mercy's words, exactly, spoken in a delicate marble room on Callamar, with one hand on her jaw and a glass in the other. It had sounded like a threat then. Now, she took it as an instruction.
Cassilde had seen to the cup earlier, in her rooms, with the door locked. It was the cup she always used, polished to the same shine, and nobody on Throneworld had ever questioned why the cupbearer kept a cup of her own. The nnar root lived at the back of her tongue now, familiar as disdain. A little every morning, until her body stopped treating it like an active threat to her life and started treating it as a habit. Six months of quiet, patient, unglamorous discipline in the suffering.
Her mother would have called it beneath her.
Séverine would have asked what had taken her so long.
She poured steadily. Wordlessly. With the proper decorum required. Back straight. Shoulders down. Expression placid.
If I were going to kill her, I'd have the easiest job in the galaxy.
Words spoken aloud to Aria Talorien before half the galaxy's warmongers and an open bar. It took a library, a survey of Firrerreo biology dry enough to choke on, a garden, and a root that tasted like dirt and offered quiet suffering at microdoses. Cassilde thought that she would write to Aria later and correct the record, assuming either of them lived long enough to keep up a correspondence.
She turned from the station and walked, walked past the obsidian that clashed with the marble, that then clashed with the gold, which clashed with everything else. Past pillars thick enough to hide behind if one was so inclined to hide. Every surface in this place had belonged to someone else once, and Cassilde could not decide, on the balance of things, whether that made her part of the collection or not. Arris, the misanthropic creature that had first befuddled her on arrival, considered her not a prize or a pet, but currency. Frankly, the notion of existing to be traded or kept bore a sickness worse than the nnar root.
She'd rather be neither. She would be. She had to be.
Were she to stand at Mercy's side a moment longer as a beautiful, ornamental set of eyes and ears that poured swill on command and smiled softly as entertainment, then Cassilde might have considered turning the cup on herself.
There had been a point, not that long ago, when the Hapan had noticed the sour taste to her thoughts, and had reasonably blamed her company. The company had not improved, and yet she noticed less and less when every acrid notion crossed her mind. Every backhanded comment reserved for the person she was speaking to at any given moment felt natural now. It only mattered that it never crossed her face.
The mask.
Warm, soft, genial. The slight smile that had become something of an effort to arrange every morning. The steps up to the throne had been built for a body twice her size, and she climbed them like an invited woman, eyes lingering on the amber liquid in the cup as if it were the only thing that required her attention. It was. Cassilde could not recall when she had stopped planning how she would leave in the aftermath.
"Welcome home, My Lord," she finally said softly, her eyes downcast in reverence, inclining her head as protocol required, the cup steady in her hand. She would not be so eager to thrust the drink at Mercy. She would wait for the instruction, the nod to taste and then serve. She would wait.
And she would watch.
Mercy
Throneworld always knew when its master was home.
Much to Cassilde's surprise, it was nothing so vulgar as an announcement; no, the colossal station simply shifted, like guards adjusting their posture, as the Alcyne did when she came in from Callamar's gentle mist. The Graspborn in the corridors stood a degree straighter, the servants walked faster, and the entire gaudy carcass of a place seemed to hold its breath. Was it awe? Was it fear? The Hapan found she didn't care; she didn't care beyond the fact that it was useful information.
So she went to her station, as she always did. In anticipation of the tyrant's needs, never, ever out of care.
Six months.
What a wretched six months.
When her fate was sealed, and her new station in life was passed down to her by a brutish hand that crushed the air from her throat, she had anticipated a great many things about what her life would be like. The Hapan had found, much to her dismay, that she was wrong about most of them. The people here were an assortment of the wretched and the royal. Cyborg vagrants alongside Queens, deviant psychopaths alongside nervous girls who bit themselves to cope. How funny, really, that the person Cassilde found most palatable was a 'dead' actress whose connection to her own sanity seemed tenuous at best.
But she had endured. She had waited. She was patient.
The doors of the audience chamber had been built for a larger ego than the one presently occupying them, which, quite frankly, was a spectacular feat, and the walk from them was long, the lights atrociously dim as they tended to be here, and her heels announced her across the floor like a herald with nothing kind to say. She did not yet look to the throne; there would be time enough for that later. Cassilde had yet to become accustomed to the abominable orgy of obsidian and gold, and for that she was glad; her taste remained intact.
Her station sat where it always sat, tucked away to one side among the pillars, where the decanters lived in company with the Empress' taste in drink. Kor Vella Black Seal. A private allocation of Corellian Whiskey, numbered bottles sealed in black wax and a waiting list as long as a Hapan grudge, all so that a woman with the palate of a gundark could throw it down her neck as if she were a docker with a pint of warm urine calling itself otherwise. It was a prestige drink, yes, but Cassilde had classified it on her first week aboard as somewhere between paint thinner and regret. Six months had revised a great many of her opinions on matters, but not that.
The glass could be touched, even if the bottle was not.
Mercy's words, exactly, spoken in a delicate marble room on Callamar, with one hand on her jaw and a glass in the other. It had sounded like a threat then. Now, she took it as an instruction.
Cassilde had seen to the cup earlier, in her rooms, with the door locked. It was the cup she always used, polished to the same shine, and nobody on Throneworld had ever questioned why the cupbearer kept a cup of her own. The nnar root lived at the back of her tongue now, familiar as disdain. A little every morning, until her body stopped treating it like an active threat to her life and started treating it as a habit. Six months of quiet, patient, unglamorous discipline in the suffering.
Her mother would have called it beneath her.
Séverine would have asked what had taken her so long.
She poured steadily. Wordlessly. With the proper decorum required. Back straight. Shoulders down. Expression placid.
If I were going to kill her, I'd have the easiest job in the galaxy.
Words spoken aloud to Aria Talorien before half the galaxy's warmongers and an open bar. It took a library, a survey of Firrerreo biology dry enough to choke on, a garden, and a root that tasted like dirt and offered quiet suffering at microdoses. Cassilde thought that she would write to Aria later and correct the record, assuming either of them lived long enough to keep up a correspondence.
She turned from the station and walked, walked past the obsidian that clashed with the marble, that then clashed with the gold, which clashed with everything else. Past pillars thick enough to hide behind if one was so inclined to hide. Every surface in this place had belonged to someone else once, and Cassilde could not decide, on the balance of things, whether that made her part of the collection or not. Arris, the misanthropic creature that had first befuddled her on arrival, considered her not a prize or a pet, but currency. Frankly, the notion of existing to be traded or kept bore a sickness worse than the nnar root.
She'd rather be neither. She would be. She had to be.
Were she to stand at Mercy's side a moment longer as a beautiful, ornamental set of eyes and ears that poured swill on command and smiled softly as entertainment, then Cassilde might have considered turning the cup on herself.
There had been a point, not that long ago, when the Hapan had noticed the sour taste to her thoughts, and had reasonably blamed her company. The company had not improved, and yet she noticed less and less when every acrid notion crossed her mind. Every backhanded comment reserved for the person she was speaking to at any given moment felt natural now. It only mattered that it never crossed her face.
The mask.
Warm, soft, genial. The slight smile that had become something of an effort to arrange every morning. The steps up to the throne had been built for a body twice her size, and she climbed them like an invited woman, eyes lingering on the amber liquid in the cup as if it were the only thing that required her attention. It was. Cassilde could not recall when she had stopped planning how she would leave in the aftermath.
"Welcome home, My Lord," she finally said softly, her eyes downcast in reverence, inclining her head as protocol required, the cup steady in her hand. She would not be so eager to thrust the drink at Mercy. She would wait for the instruction, the nod to taste and then serve. She would wait.
And she would watch.
Mercy