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Cordelia likes to think that after three years of fighting the Crown’s favorite new weapons, she’s grown used to seeing them wear her sister’s face.
She’s stared at the clones in reports and news streams enough, tried to foster a deliberate sense of disconnection. Looking at the screen and seeing a nose, eyes, a mouth, cheekbones and jaw and forehead, rather than a whole. There is no face. The face means nothing. The clones are nothing but facsimiles of soldiers. Particularly complicated automata, just built of flesh rather than steel.
Seeing them in person is… far more challenging.
The first time Cordelia killed one, her hands shook for days. At that point, she’d only directly killed a few regular humans, only just gathered enough might to begin fighting. She still wasn’t used to it– the blood, the smell, the feeling of watching a person go still and knowing they’d never move again. As much as she’d managed to excise of Snow Prince, there was still enough of her left in Cordelia to flinch at the violence.
To then look in the face she knew as Rose’s and do all that to her…
Didn’t she already kill Rose once by revealing her plans for the wedding? What is the difference in doing it herself, rather than through Cole? Why should she be kept sheltered from the reality of her death?
When she can bring herself to think about it, Cordelia guesses she died by injection or perhaps suffocation. Something that kept her body intact for Cole’s scientists to use. It wouldn’t have been as bloody as a bullet. It doesn’t mean it would have been less horrifying. Witnessing that face going slack over and over, facing the violence she put Rose in the way of, is only right.
It’s what she deserves.
She still hates going out on missions she knows she’ll encounter the clones on. She hates planning around them, running the risk of an altercation, always a few small misfortunes away from being wounded or worse at their hands. Once, one managed to grab Cordelia before Dunwich dispatched it. Her skin still crawls when she thinks about the thing’s warm skin against hers.
And yet, facing them is unavoidable. She has a war to fight. She can’t afford to avoid the difficult work that entails.
Today she’d been visiting a contact just outside of Aesop. It takes an ever-increasing amount of weapons and supplies to keep the rebellion running, and one of their key dealers had been in danger of backing out of their agreement. Cordelia had paid them a personal visit in their large home at the top of a cliff overlooking this planet’s warm seas. She’d just managed to persuade them to continue funnelling weapons from Aesop’s factories to the rebellion, and tomorrow she’ll fly back to Winthrop.
Despite her connections here, she doesn’t have a secured base. She and her party are staying the night with a local rebel sympathizer. Cordelia isn’t likely to sleep– she’s reasonably sure the woman won’t betray them, sure enough to have agreed to stay, but one can never be certain. She spreads her datapads over the bed in the room she’s been given and does her best to settle in to work next to her snoring off-duty bodyguards. It would be easier if there was an office that met her preferred standards of security, but at this stage, that’s too much to ask.
It does mean that when her comms rings late in the evening with a call from Tuco, she has no good place to take it. Either she risks being overheard, or she finds somewhere more exposed. After a moment of deliberation, she steps outside, making for the enclosed yard. It faces a back street, and at this time of night there are unlikely to be passersby. It will be the most private option she has.
Outside, the night air is warm and humid, a slight salty breeze sighing through the city. The yard is surrounded by a chest-high wall covered in the same white stucco as the house. Most of the available space is taken up by large potted plants. It’s covered enough, and she has her gun in case of emergency. As soon as she’s surveyed the space to her satisfaction, she answers her comms.
The call is nothing surprising– just a status update on Tuco’s various projects and underlings. It doesn’t take long to cover everything, and within fifteen minutes Cordelia hangs up and turns to go back in.
She stops when, out of the corner of her eye, she spots a massive shadow just beyond the wall.
She whirls on it, free hand already flying to the gun under her jacket. Her worst fear is confirmed as soon as she looks at it– it’s a giant. Probably seven feet tall, uniformed, scarlet hair shaved close to its scalp, but aside from that so horribly familiar. Cordelia draws her gun and begins to raise it before she registers that it isn’t moving. It doesn’t even seem to be holding a weapon, and its face is open with confusion. She’s never seen a look like that on one of them, but it’s still a look she once knew very well.
Before she can shoot it, the giant hesitantly asks, “Snow?”
Cordelia’s heart stops, all the blood draining from her face. It should not know that name. It should not know her.
Her body starts moving again before her mind does. She lunges for it, reaches up to grab the collar of its uniform and drag it down to her height. Its eyes widen.
“Where the hell did you get that name from, giant?” she snarls, jamming the barrel of her gun against its carotid artery.
If Cordelia didn’t have a gun to its throat, it could easily pull away, or worse, grab her. It could crush her skull in its bare hands if it got hold of her. But it just breathes shallowly, staring at her. “I– I don’t know. But that’s right. Isn’t it?”
It sounds like Rose. It sounds exactly how Rose would have, with the same stupid cluelessness, the same cadence and diction. It even has the same baffled crease between its brows. Cordelia wants to scream.
“No,” she says instead. Even if Snow weren’t dead, this thing would not have the right to call her that. It doesn’t have the right to recognize her. Why the hell is it able to recognize her? “Why do you think that? You have five seconds to answer me.”
“I– I don’t know!” it cries. “I know you. What the hell happened? Why are you– you’re not supposed to–”
“You do not know me. We have never met. You are a Crown war machine.” She digs the gun deeper into its skin. Do giants bruise like humans? If they do, and if this one was going to survive long enough, she’d be giving it one. “So why do you think you have a sister? What do you remember?”
The giant blinks rapidly at her, as if it wants to cry. “I remember you. They did something to me, I think; I didn’t before but– why didn’t I remember you? What happened to me? What happened to you, fuck, where did you get those scars–”
Cordelia shoots it. It reels back, blood spraying from its neck and soaking hot into her clothes. The sounds coming from it are horrible– strangled, gurgling approximations of panicked breaths. The way it looks at her… its eyes are wide, its face twisted in pain and betrayal. As if Cordelia owed it a damn thing, as if its existence isn’t the deepest betrayal possible of Cordelia’s actual sister.
She snarls at it, tasting its blood in her mouth, and shoots it again. This time the bullet lodges in its chest. That in addition to its mangled throat is enough to drop it to its knees, and then for it to collapse to the side. All goes silent when it finally stops trying to breathe. Its eyes are glassy, face frozen in that awful, insulting expression.
Cordelia stays frozen, too. Her stomach twists powerfully enough she almost vomits. All she can do is stare at the thing.
How the hell did it recognize her? How the hell did it know to call her Snow?
If it weren’t so damn massive, she could have mistook it for Rose. Did it think itself Rose? Did it somehow believe that it was her?
There isn’t time to wonder. The gunshots were too loud; there’s no chance no one heard. She forces herself to take a step back, then another, until she’s staggering into the house. She went over the evacuation procedure with everyone inside when they arrived. They all know what to do when she starts knocking at their doors. Their priority now is getting the hell out before more giants come swarming to investigate the threat.
She doesn’t realize she’s been shaking until their ship nearly clears the system. Once they’re certain enough they’ll all escape with their lives, Cordelia tries to use the ship’s comms to send news to expect them back on Winthrop sooner than expected. As she tries to work the buttons and dials, though, she finds her hands are trembling badly enough to make her fumble for far too long. She finally manages to send along the message, then clenches her fists and takes a deep breath. She’s better than this.
When she turns around in the pilot’s chair, Tevi, the head of her guard, is looking at her with clear concern. “Sir, you’re covered in blood.”
Cordelia looks down at herself. She’d honestly forgotten, though she must look like a nightmare. By now, a good portion of it has begun to dry.
“It’s the giant’s,” she says dismissively. Her voice sounds strange in her ears. Her tone certainly isn’t quite what she intends– a bit too soft, the accent a bit too high-class. She doesn’t feel like she’s entirely inside her body.
Tevi’s thick brows are furrowed as she looks Cordelia over. “You’re certain? If you don’t mind me saying so, sir, you look a bit pale.”
She grimaces. “I would not take such a stupid chance with my safety, Tevi. I simply need to change and wash.” She reaches for her cane and just manages to not knock it to the floor from where she propped it. “I believe I’ll do that now.”
Before anyone can question her, or worse, before she can do anything else that would suggest she’s shaken, she stands and marches to the bunks at the back of the ship. The woman who opened her home to them lies there, asleep or feigning it. Cordelia doesn’t bother her– they’ll discuss arrangements to care for her later. She imagines both of them will prefer that.
She quietly grabs a fresh set of clothes from her things and then locks herself in the washroom. The space is just large enough for a person, with a discolored rectangle on the wall where the mirror has been removed. As soon as the door is secured, she strips off her bloodied clothes.
They’ll probably be ruined. Irritating.
She turns the shower on to lukewarm. It would take too long for the hot water to start running, and besides that she doesn’t feel like moisturizing her scars tonight. She shivers slightly as she steps in, but exhales as she gets used to the temperature and dips her head under the faucet. There’s blood in her hair.
Snow would have been aghast at that. Not only at the remnants of violence, but also for her vanity’s sake– what would it do to the shine and softness she worked so hard to maintain? How long would it take to properly detangle and condition it after working the blood out? What if, gods forbid, she damaged it somehow?
Cordelia finds herself laughing, a harsh, bitter sound.
It’s all absurd and horrible. She hasn’t been Snow for nearly six years. Snow died on the Anderson. Why the hell should a giant see that foolish girl’s face in Cordelia’s?
Why the hell should a giant know Snow Prince at all? Cordelia’s gut twists, and she sobers as she starts working shampoo through her hair. They aren’t Rose. If they remembered her, remembered what Cole did to her, there’s no way in hell they’d fight for him. This one had to have been an outlier– not a single one has ever treated Cordelia as anything but a target before.
This one looked at her like a sister.
It’s dead. It’s dead at her hand, and its blood is currently circling the drain. Whatever it thought it had to say to her, it never will.
Rose is dead, too. Whatever mannerisms it stole from her, whatever chord it was able to strike in Cordelia from the way it spoke, whatever it believed, she will never see her sister again. She’s been gone for years. Those things are nothing but mockeries.
Best to put it out of her mind. She has a war to fight.
When it’s over, she’ll ensure every last bastardization of Rose dies with the empire that made them.