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For the half-tick before it fades, the metallic scrape of his armor fills the silence, his chair bending easily with the loosening of limbs and spine. With the utter dearth of any seat not too petite to hold him, Raht had not expected the one he did find to be quite so comfortable. But even Haggar must appreciate quality in all things—including in chairs that aren't even hers.
His brow creases at the thought. Whose chair would this be, then?
That sudden urge to peer into the shadows proves just what an omnipotent figure his emperor is, in which a brief stab at who she might have chairs lying around for yields only one plausible result. Raht sets his jaw and shuts away the rampant voice of paranoia, that skin-crawling feeling of eyes from everywhere which any ruler on the scale of gods and galaxies would naturally inspire. He's served in Lord Zarkon's inner circle for far too long to give in to the illogic of fear and grandeur; the Emperor means to paint himself a god, after all. Having taken orders from him and learned firsthand that the Emperor is no creature of smoke and fire up close, Raht knows well enough to assume Lord Zarkon does not lurk in the dark like a spectre in Haggar's labs—nor would he be so illogical to condemn Raht for sitting in any chair the High Priestess offered him.
(Though... it was not offered. It was allowed. The nuance won't likely change the matter.)
He cannot imagine Lord Zarkon sitting here like this. Too unlikely? Or too... unnatural? An image of the Emperor on his throne, garbed in his red mantle and issuing orders—that is natural. Lifted above his commanders and generals on a dais, his voice raised for a purpose... How easy to imagine the Emperor like that, but to picture him in naught but a plain, simple chair, perhaps this very same one, unadorned and quiet in a darkened lab...?
Raht has more cause than most to be in Haggar's labs—more cause that doesn't involve experimental prosthetics or questionable procedures he'd rather not know the details of—and his path has crossed the Emperor's more than once in these halls. His Majesty was always searching for Haggar, and several times he asked Raht himself for her location, as though Raht would know (which, thankfully, he did). And one time, when tasks of Raht's own brought him close enough to hear the two speak, the low tones of the Emperor's voice reached him despite every attempt not to listen, the sound of them etching itself into his memory like a chisel into stone—unable to be erased. In that dark lab, His Majesty spoke so differently from the emperor on the throne; the words might have slipped from Raht's memory the very tick they entered, but the sound of them could never leave, a strangely softer tone, loose and unembellished in ways he could not describe, a secret of his lord he was quite certain he should not have heard.
And this lab, this chair? Sitting simply to watch Haggar work, just as Raht does now...?
That would not be so unnatural for his emperor.
Raht folds his arms before him, both the armored one and the mechanical. A rumbled sigh of breath echoes into the silent air. At her workstation, Haggar coaxes a hologram closer with the pull of her hand; the thin pink lines glimmer as they shift, their data nothing but a glowing halo at this distance... not that he was trying to see. Haggar would frown at him if he was.
He wonders: How many laws of secrecy are being bent just by his mere presence in this room?
She never breaks them for him, but she has been known to bend them.
Her entire slight frame is curled over the control panel, her movements only a hint of motion beyond the wall of her back. They draw his eye regardless. She does. A small huff of breath, only to himself. That is nothing new.
How long has it been so far? Sometimes he loses track. Extended operations on a slow-turning planet have his schedule out of line, even in the long-term. It's the middle of the night cycle in Central Command, but he won't be able to sleep for vargas yet. That's why he's here—an excuse to spend time with her when he isn't yawning every other tick.
With her gaze elsewhere, too focused on her work to catch him, he gives himself a chance to study her—and he is taking a liberty with it. More than once he's earned a sharp, piercing look for gazing too long, but somehow, perhaps just as often, she gives him only a blank stare. Observant, but gentle, benign. Look all you want, she says with it, but she still dares him—guarded in its depths, that wariness remains, as though she never learned how to lower those walls, not even for him.
How long has he known her now? How long? If he thinks, he will remember, but...
Perhaps this question is more accurate: How long since Haggar started giving him the name friend in her mind? Maybe that's what he really wants to know.
Or maybe he wants to know how long since other words began to join it—words that were not Raht or friend or general. And perhaps, because (he was told in his youth) he's too bold and tenacious for his own good, maybe he wants to know what those other words are.
He'd be a fool to think they don't exist—and in denial. Haggar may be enough of a mystery that he will never unravel her, but he has known her for—how long? The tone of her voice, the set of her shoulders as he walks alongside her, those placid, benign glances she gives when she is otherwise such a creature of sharpness and strength...
He and Haggar have become something over many decaphoebs, but that doesn't mean, even after this long, that he knows what it is.
Her shoulders curl in that easy, casual set as she works—more proof she is at home here. And to allow him at her back unobserved—once, he would not have known the honor, the privilege, the trust of that. (How long has it been?)
To ask her questions—particularly the ones poking at more personal matters—is always a gamble. Sometimes she stares, only to snap her gaze away and move on. Other times that stare lingers, her eyes narrowed, a warning not to ask again. Sometimes, and more often than he ever expects, she offers up some quiet answer, truthful and vague in equal measures, a laden pause afterward as she seems to realize again just how deep her trust runs, and in which Raht falls in love with her for the thousandth time—(it won't be the last).
Haggar stills at her workstation, pausing before reaching for a different hologram. She draws it close, tilting her head as she studies it, and something in Raht's heart... shifts.
"Haggar."
She straightens, her robes a dark fall around her as she turns, haloed by the light of her holograms and screens. Her eyes, from the shadow of her hood, glow as bright as the system's twin suns.
"What are we?" Raht asks her.
A blink.
Her back again faces him as she returns to her work, reaching for some glimmering diagram, but she does answer, her voice almost lilting in the familiar tone of one who contemplates the unimaginable for a living (and quantifies it). "We are but facets in the universe's schemes, Raht."
His ears flick back, his eyes narrowed just a fraction, but the urge for a dissatisfied rumble dies in his throat. (Her hearing is too keen.) He may know enough of the answer, enough of what she is to him—(you are my friend. Somehow, you are my dearest friend)—but...
To call that "not enough" would be a lie—an insult. Her friendship is enough, but it is an enigma, an anomaly. She does not have friends, and he means that nowhere close to as disparaging as it would sound in any other's mind.
After this long, he can be certain there is no one else. Never does she linger in any other's presence, be it soldier or druid (but excepting the Emperor). Never does she speak to another beyond mere orders and observations, let alone confiding, discussing, conversing like they have done so many times, late into the night until he worries for his morning shift and she seems to have tired not at all.
Somehow he has made himself singular in the High Priestess's life, and he takes no pride in that, only the occasional pleasure of her company. And somehow, without intending to, the place he has wormed himself into is a place of friendship, but though completely accurate, that word is like a room viewed from a single angle—it is not coherent. It's a fractured shard of a larger whole, and so he wants to know—what are we, Haggar?
It may well be too great and obscured for him to shape into words, but "facets of the universe" is not it.
A part of him, still, chides wryly: If you didn't want trite platitudes, you shouldn't have asked what you knew she wouldn't answer.
(He hadn't known, though; she is unpredictable.)
"What name does the universe call us by?" he asks. He sinks back further into his chair, pressing his fingertips together. Perhaps she will answer this one. "Where do we fit in its future plans?"
Again she half-turns from her work, and the way she goes still, her head angled, it's almost as though she does listen to the very fabric of reality, to what it sings. Her power is legendary, but he more than most comes closer to knowing the true scope of it. If she said the universe itself whispered in her ears, he would believe it.
"It gives us many names, Raht," she says, and, "I know the words for none of them."
Now she turns fully, those sun-bright eyes alighting on him. "And the universe does not plan. It schemes. Schema—a pattern, framework, or model underlying a system. The schema it created may be in effect, but it knows not where it will flow any more than you or I."
"I see...," he murmurs. But does he?
She turns again, though slower this time, a last, lingering gleam of her eyes from the shadow. When she has her back to him, the set of her shoulder is lower but somehow coiled tighter.
"The universe simply is, Raht," she murmurs, almost so soft his ears miss the words. "That is all it can ever be."
"I see," he says. And he does.
He gives a soft rumble, nominally of the sort meant to reassure, though he would not dare insinuate she needs it, and her head angles just enough he knows she heard. (How she can hear from across the room, he has never understood, but perhaps like the universe, she simply is.)
Her shoulders uncoil, a thin-fingered hand reaching to tap across a key-panel.
Back to normal, then. So it is.
In the silence, he traces his gaze over the thin curve of her back. Again, she does not feel his eyes on her, or perhaps more likely, she allows it. And again—he wonders: How did he find himself in her trust? How long has he known her, and what does it matter if the universe she listens to speaks their names in words neither of them can comprehend?
It is enough—they are, she is. Had he not learned long ago that she will always be enough?
His rumble of contentment goes unrestrained—he makes no effort to try—but her motions carry on regardless. All the better; to let him rumble without inspection is how she says she's well at ease.
Stars, but he loves her, and maybe he shouldn't, or maybe it's only natural, but when she talks about the universe and its facets and the way it spins, that's how she says I know. And every time her voice takes on a tone so very similar to the Emperor's from that lab so long ago, when the two of them are alone together and they simply are and the universe might as well have stopped spinning around them, such ease in her eyes as she looks on him, that is how she says I love you, too.
And that doesn't need a name. It doesn't need to be understood, or else she would have turned it into one of her experiments decaphoebs ago.
Let it be, Raht.
As if he needs to be told.
No, he understands all he needs to—that they are, just like the universe, just like everything in it. And if there are no words for that?
Then so be it.
Let them be mere facets, then.