Work Text:
and there’s obstacles to her back and light to her left and dark to her right and horrible steady salvation in front of her and Dedra knows she's shuddering shuddering shuddering oh she’s
never shuddered before, never been touched before, never been stripped raw and naked before and she has the rancid mob, Syril, and herself to blame in reverse order for that triple lung stab and
she's fracturing after being cracked but she’s doing so unblinking because she has to see, she has to see him, she has to see all of it, and keeping her eyes open is one of a handful of functions she can still pretend to understand and pretend to choose and she
can’t
stop
this uncontrolled breathing,
the shuddering shame of it, the outpouring of adrenaline that’s killing her when it’s supposed to be saving her, she knows that’s its purpose, to fuel flight or fight but hers is congealing into a failed version of freeze and that’s
not
right
none of this is right but this is what it is, the muscle spasms, the nausea, the unspooling from reality and gentle overboard push into a fresh reality that’s existed since the dawn of creation and these
spasms
prevent her from swimming to the shore because she knows how to swim, she’s a strong swimmer, she’s been swimming against the tide her entire life, but being dragged along that sandpaper road of death has scraped her skin to the bone and the salt water is so heavy it makes her want to cry but she won’t,
she doesn’t know how to,
so she’ll bob and float and keep her head above the surface and keep her eyes on him,
on Syril,
on her lighthouse,
on a blighted construction she’d declared condemned in accordance with Imperial ordnance,
a dilapidated, damaged construct too far gone into disrepair and decrepitude to be dangerous but,
but a brick hits her in alternate force to the physical bricks still raining down outside and makes her think, makes her realise, that Syril isn’t a mass produced column from a sterile factory or a line of data on a bleached spreadsheet typed by numb fingers but is a pillar, for a pillar is a structure’s foundation and support not a column and
she needs this, needs him, needs this skeletal lighthouse that can withstand the brutal local environmental conditions he’s fated to endure because he’s tailored himself to offer less surface area to The Empire’s hurricane-force winds and the Rebel’s scatter-spit fire and she
Needs
Him.
Dedra sucks in a desperate breath as if she’s only now been permitted to break the water’s surface and she gulps at the air greedily, sucks down oxygen that’s tainted and she’s
back
under
to shudder again, tremble again, feel waves of heat and ice break over her skin and she feels it more acutely now, is starting to register how deep her cracks have always been, and she doesn’t want Syril to be the one to map them, doesn’t want him to see them, doesn’t want him to be here, doesn’t want him to leave, for what if that smile blisters across his lips again and he leaves her,
he’ll rotate sideways and slide outside into that nightmare of light and noise and he won’t break eye contact with her as he leaves her to face a worse type of despair and
but he’s here.
She breaches the surface again and breathes air that’s salty sharp in this stagnant closet and
Syril’s here. He’s here in front of her when a long blistered second ago he was behind her, was physically behind her with a gun pressed into her back and was mentally behind a long list of priorities she’d been focusing on but her focus has changed now,
has narrowed now,
has deepened all three strands of the tensile strengths wrapped around her brain stem and
she almost died out there, was almost dragged into the void out there, but almost is not fact and it’s that fact she clings to with the arm that’s not on Syril and she’s still not
still,
she’s still not steady, she's been swallowed into a sinkhole after several of her internal pillars were exposed for the hollow constructs they are and so many were amputated but
things can be regrown, she can rebuild, she just needs a steady platform to plan on and she didn't want to be saved out there,
she wanted to survive herself, wanted to defeat them herself, and she hates Syril for what he did for her and she feels sick with herself for thinking this and she’s sick of feeling sick, she needs to purge herself, these unnatural thoughts of regret and doubt and compassion and she could hit Syril,
could headbutt him, could knee him, could kick him, could do one of many things she was taught long ago in that mandatory hand to hand combat class but she doesn’t have the energy, doesn’t have the will, doesn't have the focus because Syril is here and looking at her and not leaving, he’s not leaving her he’ll never leave her and instead of listing what she doesn’t have what if she investigates what she does have it
might not be a lot but she will make it enough her
muscles feel like sponge and her bones feel like straw and
Syril intervened when she was free-falling and guided her to safety, guided, not yanked, and now he’s watching her engine billow smoke and her mechanics screech and her platinum armour bleed and
he’s not judging her. He’s not surprised at what he’s bearing witness to. He’s not repulsed. He’s not satisfied.
He’s calm. He’s calm and he’s with her and he always will be with her, and she knows this the way you know the sun will outlast your lifetime.
Dedra breathes another steady breath. The bubble in her spirit level line is crawling backwards to its rightful centre but it’s still not there yet, it’s still in flux, but she’s getting there, he’s helping her get there he
is still here. Still silent and steady after he was action and forward momentum. He continues to give her what she needs.
She knows this isn’t right. She knows this isn’t what she wants even though it’s what she needs.
What she does know is that Syril is the rare individual who’ll survive successive annihilation attempts because his armour is made from spite and hope and solid self-belief he’s transmuted from imposed self-doubt. No Armourer alive can forge it. Such protection can only be grown by the person wearing it.
Syril stands still. And watches her. Like he’s done before.
He stands still and listens to her like he’s done before.
He listens to her breathing. To her panting. To her unspoken declarations. To her lizard brain’s silent screaming and
not many people truly listen to her. Only herself. And now him.
She hears how regulated her breathing has become and when did that happen? She's still twitching from low grade electrical shocks so she's not perfectly still, she's still not as steady as she should be, but she feels better.
And she feels worse.
These electrical shocks play out over her exposed wiring. It’s dangerous for her to remain open like this. It’s dangerous for anyone who gets near her. It’s dangerous that she doesn’t want Syril to get hurt by her. And it’s red line critical how she’s being warmed with warped pleasure knowing that Syril doesn’t consider her a threat.
How dare he.
How dare he do this to her.
Here, in this liminal space he’s had the audacity to declare her refuge, he watches her unblinking and sinks himself into the rot to be her pillar. He deserves to be consumed with filth. Deserves to buckle and break after she’s drained him of every scrap of strength she needs back.
But he’d like that. He’d dissolve into the nothing that he is with serenity and gratitude and he doesn’t deserve that, he doesn’t deserve anything more from her. He’s already taken ownership of too much and
Enough.
This stops here.
Dedra will take back what is rightfully hers and then some. She’ll remind them both who this space belongs to, because this planet belongs to a sector that belongs to The Empire which pumps her blood more powerfully than her flawed biological heart ever could and she will not see it rupture.
Syril’s partly open mouth opens wider as if he’s about to say something and no, no, he will no longer be the one leading this first draft of a conversation she will silence him and speak over him and that’s all, that’s all she wants to accomplish here as she
leans forward and kisses him.
Syril freezes. His support struts ice over. An inferno consumes him. Heat and ice crash over him and rupture his foundations and puncture his fortifications. She can practically see this destruction happen.
But practically is not reality. The images in her mind are not what are playing out. Nothing is as it should be here in this room, in this unmapped extension of living.
Syril may have frozen, but he’s not breaking.
Reality whispers into what Dedra thought was her unclogged hearing that Syril is being strengthened, that you are strengthening him.
No.
No.
Dedra kisses him again. She kisses him hard, a closed mouth kiss onto his pliant lips. He has no right to be so unmoved. No right to feel so soft. No right to ignore her. No right to deny her after he’s just demonstrated that he’ll give her anything.
Dedra kisses him harder. She pushes into him as if pressure is all it takes to break someone.
Syril doesn't buckle. He doesn't whine. He doesn't gasp and pass out and hit his head. He doesn't do any of the things she's told herself that he'd do, that she was looking forward to him doing, that she needs him to do.
He just stands there.
Her kiss fires a charge with furious aim to reset herself to a previously saved checkpoint. It's fuelled by nuclear longing and it misses.
She misses her target as if it were a thousand sectors away.
Syril absorbs her destruction as if he needs it to live. He lets himself be destroyed. Dedra knows that he wants her to do what she wants with him in the way that she wants it. And she wants this. Of course she doesn’t want this. And how dare he continue to give her what she wants while giving her nothing, he will be whatever she needs him to be, he's not reacting to her at all and
she thought he'd be overwhelmed by this. That he'd kiss her back hard; would sink trembling fingers into her hair; would hold onto her waist as if she were his lifeline. He’d slide his tongue into her mouth because he was terrified of death by dehydration and he'd be desperate, sloppy. Hot. Grateful. Uncontrolled. Loud.
She'd allow him precisely two seconds of enhanced existence before she'd slide a hand up his chest and push him away as if he was a clot of wet tissue stuck to her.
But he is the epitome of control.
He is what she needs to return to. Their poles have been reversed and she doesn't like it, doesn't like that she can’t function in such a hostile environment while he thrives in it.
A blessedly familiar bolt of irritation zips through her. It crashes into the unfamiliar electrical storms zinging around her cells and enters into overdue battle with them.
Dedra jerks her head back and immediately snaps it forward and kisses him as hard as she can.
This physical contact is so alien to her she barely feels it. She's detached from it. She is logical pathways and the manifestation of abstract plans. And that's all she needs to be. It's all she wants to be.
Her heart is
beat
beat
beating and she's choosing to kiss him, which means she's captaining her ship again, and he is nothing more than a stationary support object built to assist those who have been tasked with responsibility and purpose. He is not meant to break. He should be breaking. Why is he so unknown to her? She thought she knew him. She thought she knew herself.
Her higher functions slowly drag themselves back to work, resentful that Dedra’s canceled the only break they’ve ever had.
Dedra does know Syril. She doesn't want to, but she does. He is a puzzle so easy to solve that she’s sometimes confused by its simplicity. She knows that whatever she does to him will sustain him.
It's only her inaction and indifference that will erode him.
But Dedra doesn't want to be inactive right now. She wants to make it clear to him that she’s doing this because she wants to; that she’s kissing him for reasons that aren’t as obvious as his middling intellect thinks they are.
Even though they are, Dedra’s spiteful neurons spit. You know it and he knows it and he knows you know he knows it. Who are you trying to kid here?
Dedra closes her eyes. She moves forward, forward, forward in degrees. She exerts a pressure that drains the colour from both of their lips and replaces it with white. White the colour of absence. Of a blank space between them and connecting them.
Dedra knows she can’t keep this up.
She’s not functioning at her physical best and is working at depths she has no experience with. Whereas Syril is in his element here, in the unknown hostile dark between the walls of an invisible compressor.
Dedra has no choice but to surface for air. She pulls back from Syril and inhales sharply.
Syril doesn't take the opening. He doesn't spring forward and grab her and kiss her hard. He doesn’t crush her with his lips and body and press her into another state of feeling, even though the pressure he’s currently exerting on her is palpable.
She'll be damned if this is how she drowns.
Dedra opens her eyes and scowls at him.
Syril’s molton eyes widen fractionally, as if to say, 'It's about time.'
But maybe that's not what he's saying. Maybe she's misheard him. Maybe he is stricken that she's withdrawn. Maybe he is horrified that he's remained inactive while his crowning fantasy smashes itself to splinters on his unforgiving shore. His language is one she's not yet fluent in.
Her cerebellum sighs at her. It offers words of advice. Maybe Dedra should change her angle of attack. She could shift her fighting stance into something softer, something stronger. She could ease off the thrusters and recalculate her trajectory. Her cerebrum agrees that her muscles are in poor condition and in poor position.
And it reminds her that if it rains and storms, a person will tighten their coat around them like armor. But if the sweet sun shines hotly, that person will strip their layers off and expose their skin to burns.
Dedra kisses Syril softly. She kisses him with a feather light force that hides a supernova.
She watches Syril close his eyes.
That's better.
She thinks it's better. It doesn't feel better but she can tell herself that it is. She can force the pieces of what she’s creating into a picture she's familiar with.
She feels Syril's breath on her skin. His exhalations are even and rapid, even and rapid, even and rapid and
she doesn’t have the vocabulary to describe how he smells. What his molecules are doing to hers. Her higher brain functions are drained of power with an ease that’s horrific and a long time coming and he’s so warm, his body is so close even though she’s maintaining the same distance between them and she wants to increase it, she wants to punish him, she wants to inhale him until that’s what stops her lungs.
Dedra kisses him harder without meaning to. The pressure she exerts on him is the same as she used previously. But this time it’s fuelled by a different mixture of fossil fuels. Syril must be able to taste it.
Because his breathing stutters.
For the first time, he is unsteady above her.
Dedra presses further into him, into the person she wants to thank and curse, into her saviour and her sickness, her kiss propelled by logic but constructed by passion.
Hate is passion, she forcibly reminds herself. Revenge is passion. Strength and belief in oneself is passion.
Dedra’s blood pulses thickly in her ears.
She ends her kiss and reboots it. She tilts her head into the prevailing winds, which adjusts her angle to her benefit, because all of this is for her benefit and she doesn’t care what Syril is feeling she doesn’t she doesn’t she doesn’t and her lips touch his at a sharper degree. They feel even softer. He feels even warmer.
Syril opens his lips. Slowly. Reluctantly. As if being prised open by a rusted pneumatic jack that’s as shocked as everyone else that it’s working. He opens himself into her slowly because he doesn’t believe this is happening. He opens himself to her reluctantly because he wants to. And she might not want this.
Dedra wants this.
She wants to siphon his self-control and his power. They belong to her. All of him belongs to her. Dedra knows he agrees with her on this. She doesn’t want him to. She wants him to argue and fight against her, so that she can fight back and win. She wants to take something he wants to retain. But they are too far in accord with one another that she knows she can’t win cleanly, possibly can’t win at all, she-
Syril kisses her back.
While her thoughts bicker, he’s dared to kiss her. She’s shocked that she’s not shocked by this. She hates that she doesn't hate it. He kisses her as softly and as surely as she’s kissed him, his actions buoyed by a confidence she’s suspected was always there but deserved to be locked away until it could be directed accordingly. She should pull away from him. She should end this pathetic display of dominance before he can embarrass himself by challenging her further. She should-
Syril drags his tongue across her lower lip.
And Dedra’s mind
wipes
b-
-lank
.
-
-
-
There is only sensation. Heat. Wet heat. An alcoholic effervescence she’s already drunk on.
The drag of his tongue across her mouth anesthetizes it. And detonates buried explosives in its wake.
Dedra’s body betrays her by opening her mouth wider, and her brain betrays her by hoping he does it again.
He does.
Syril reverses his strafing run and licks back along her lip. He uses everything he has. The flat width of his tongue crawls across her and he’s so warm, and so wet, and what if that tongue was inside her licking at her own and
Dedra snaps and snaps forward and bites Syril’s lower lip hard.
Syril inhales sharply. He judders as his pain receptors are the ones to scream the alarm this time.
With calibrated precision, as her expanding heart thumps
thumps
thumps
against restraints she didn’t know existed, Dedra marks him. She forces a different set of impressions onto her Syril.
Onto Syril. Just Syril. Not hers. Except he is. He always has been and always will be and
Dedra suppresses those thoughts by biting down harder. Before she can enjoy what she’s inflicting on him, he once again ambushes and assaults her.
Syril moans. Her teeth are clamped onto his lip and he’s not moaning from the pain of it. And then his hand is on the back of her neck, his fingers on her skin, holding her vise in place.
A fresh electrical shock jerks Dedra forward and forces her teeth in deeper. Syril’s moan deepens. It vibrates against her skin. It drills into her ears and surfs the marching waves of blood that fill them.
Dedra’s existence contracts to five small points. The pads of Syril’s fingers and thumb are ridged. They’re hot. They’re pressing into her skin as if scared that a loss of contact will trip the circuit and cut off the life she’s giving him.
Dedra retracts her teeth. She fights the resistance and pulls away from him. Syril lets her. But he doesn’t let go of her. He’s still holding onto the back of her neck. She’s still holding onto one of his arms. They look at each other. Once again Dedra’s eyes are wide, her mouth open, her breathing uneven.
But this time so is Syril. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his breathing uneven. They’re both bloodless and marked. They’ve reached parity. An unstable equilibrium.
They kiss each other at the same time.
They collide like they’ve done before. It’s traversing unchartered territory with only a tattered map to guide you that somehow, inexplicably somehow, carries your faint handwriting.
Dedra kisses Syril as if she’s being dragged kicking and screaming from the gutter to live in a gated mansion. Syril kisses her as if begging her to understand that she’ll always have a home with him for he is a home, not a house, a space she can seek refuge in at any time because he’s not going anywhere, his foundations are indestructible.
Dedra slides her tongue into his mouth before he can do it first. Because she knows Syril’s too far gone now to not do it. Through the soupy pulse of blood in her ears, Dedra wishes that she could have prised Syril’s lips open. But they’d parted immediately at the first hint of what she wanted. He’s so horribly perceptive.
So horribly accommodating. So warm. So wet. So this is what it means to be engulfed by another, Dedra thinks from a distance, to drown painlessly while breathing the purest form of air. The contrast doesn’t make sense. The inflating pressure behind her sternum doesn’t make sense. The knowledge that she’s wanted in every way by him doesn’t make sense. Syril wants all of her. No-one’s wanted that. Can this be possible? To go from zero and nothing to winning the race and breaking records without having any experience? Without practising? Without paying a price that’s designed to break your heart?
Dedra’s higher brain functions are running on dregs and leaking pathetically. She’s not sure what she’s thinking. Thoughts are being overwritten by feelings. By Syril’s mouth. His tongue. His fingers on her neck, five healing pressure points. Syril’s kiss is clumsy. Like hers is. He’s clearly inexperienced. Like she is. Clearly nervous. She’s not nervous. Never around him. Syril’s nerves and lack of technique are powerless against his enthusiasm. They disintegrate against his palpable desperation to make her feel good in any way that he can.
Dedra feels light headed. Vertigo caresses her skull and whispers soothing streams of rotational alignments and cracked axis and depressed fulcrums into her ear and
and
and
before she can
fall
off a different edge
into a different
plane
of reality
she
holds onto Syril harder.
And is once again steadied by him.
She clenches her free hand into a fist and holds onto Syril’s arm harder with her other. She knows he can take the pain. She knows he’ll willingly give up what little comfort his life has left for her.
She holds onto his arm near his elbow, where his brachial artery will bifurcate. Her gloved thumb is on top and her gloved fingers are wrapped underneath. While she steadies and centers herself, Dedra pretends she can feel his pulse. Even if she could, she knows this is a flawed way to take a pulse, because her thumb holds a small pulse of its own and would interfere with the rhythm of the one she wanted to measure. She would distort the results she's generating from him.
Dedra presses her thumb in harder.
Syril makes some sort of muffled sound and kisses her as if finally he’s the one who’s sinking and can't breathe fully, can't think clearly.
Dedra holds onto one of his arms with one covered hand, hard. Syril holds onto the back of her neck with one bare hand, hard. They kiss each other, hard.
Syril won’t close the space she’s established between them. He won’t overwhelm her with more skin on skin contact, won’t put his other hand on her, won’t kiss her cheek or jaw or neck. And Dedra won’t extend the space he’s closed between them. She won’t starve him. Won’t hurt him. Won’t close her mouth, won’t lock his other arm into a death grip. There are many things they won’t do to each other.
And there are many things they will do for each other.
They end their kiss at the same time. They break apart reluctantly, breathlessly. The charged atmosphere around them has evolved.
Before she can pretend that this is a spur of the moment absurd muscle spasm, Dedra puts her gloved hand on the back of Syril’s neck.
In immediate response, Syril grips Dedra’s arm above the elbow. He holds it the same way he did when he intercepted her outside the ISB building but this time he’s holding onto her with one hand, not two, and this time he’s supporting her in her desire to stay, not overriding her wishes with his own when she wanted to go. But she doesn’t want to go now. She doesn’t want to leave him. She doesn’t want to end what she’s becoming.
Syril holds onto her lightly. They both know he doesn’t need force to safely hold onto a power like hers. He’s been conversing with electricity, and would rather burn himself out than ground her.
Their foreheads touch. Their noses bump. Syril smiles a wide, beaming, utterly inappropriate smile. It's ridiculous. He’s ridiculous.
And on a day of many reluctant firsts, Dedra marks her calendar with another.
She smiles a genuine smile back at someone else. It's faint, and twitchy, and lasts for less than a second. But it’s there. It’s exposed.
It’s been unshackled.