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rosheendubh · 1 year

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AWAY…(have a ficlet From Latticeof Infinity/Elegy of Dead Kingdoms—from this shattered disaster of a crack SpaceRockOpera—the lyrics are from Nightwish’s, ‘Away’. Because some divine being posted 4+ hours of Nighwish’s Top50–and this song embraces quite the Theme of this segment from my particular AU crossover of StarWars-through TTT/HandofcThrawn/Merged Dark Empire1/Shadows of Mindor/events of the YuhzanVong War with Firefly/Serenity, and the Keltiad-squished into the Firefly ‘verse as an Independent system…)

“Away, away, away in time Every dream's a journey away Away, away, to a home away from care Everywhere's just a journey away

Cherish the moment Tower the skies Don't let the dreamer Fade to gray like grass…”

The first time Thrawn kissed Rhyanon it was after he’d destroyed a fair bit of the Galaxy by collapsing the Wormhole connecting the Terran quadrant with the quadrant of the Imperial Remnant still in conflict with the Republic Alliance. He had good intentions, because there was really no other way to slow Abaddon. But, the fallout by anyone’s measure, even megalomaniacs like the long-deceased Sith, Palpatine, proved a little apocalyptic.

Thrawn, of course, had a contingency plan for the survivors, leading them to the old ruins of the 2nd Death Star, which existed in a sort of fluctuating twilight-world of shifting space-time corridors. An after-effect of the cataclysm imploding through the continuums of the meta-verse.

Amid other events leading to this moment, Rhyanon eventually found him kneeling in the sands of the Oceans of Time, staring off into a horizon of fire and storm and cosmic winds. Pain and anger stained their shared past, dating back years to her time as a courtesan-trained-medic while in Palpatine’s court, when Thrawn was promoted to Grand Admiral on the eve of the Emperor’s death.

Until this moment, she never would have suspected Thrawn capable of suffering as other sentients. Loss, the great price of sacrificing the Ascendency to stall Abaddon’s dark ravaging of planetary systems, wrought lines of weariness heavy upon his brow, around his mouth. The shadow haunting the scarlet eyes cut raw in her heart.

Thrawn asked if her people, the Keltoi, had a word for the kind of grief that formed a void beyond emptiness. “A ballad or a lay, perhaps?” His words stumbling out in that eloquent cadence of velvet and steel, edged in bitterness. “The Keltoi—the legendary race of warrior-poets.”

Rhyanon couldn’t recall any from her youth. But then, her youth had been stolen prematurely, swept away by a brutal act of violence, taking her from everything she’d known and loved.

A memory came to her then, of her brother. Bard-trained Talhaiarn, an officer of the Keltoi fleet in service to the Ardrian Aeron Aoibhell. Warriors, the Keltoi as the Chiss, and Talhiarn renowned as a fearless pilot, a devoted commander. He’d indulged music’s magic as an escape from the horrors of war.

As she knelt before Thrawn, Rhyanon spoke gently. “I may have no verse to offer, but my brother often says the first song was born of sorrow so deep, words were inadequate to lift such sadness to the skies.”

Thrawn’s grief, his remorse, buried under the armor born of leadership, broke through, etched in rivulets of moisture, liquid garnet, like blood, rolling down his azure cheeks.

Rhyanon, with her biokinesis, accessed the nanoplexus integrated into her central nervous system. A graceful curl of her wrist, bend of a finger, she directed a green-gold plasmic current, capturing, analyzing the composition of his tears. The microscopic manifesting as vision, the molecular shaped into an endless weaving of threads imparting life. The profundity of sorrow captured like a globular prism, a raindrop, a teardrop, restless as the cosmic storms ravaging the horizon of this liminal plain.

“Chiss lacrimal secretions,” she murmured as he stared at the mirage coalesced between them, rapt by her enchantment, “while differing in certain constituents, hold a similar salinity to human tears, an osmolarity nearly matching the ocean waters.”

Rhyanon tried offering some other surcease beyond an academic text, wiping at a blood-tinged track from against his cheek. “Our tears flow, as our lives, and our griefs, rivers washed into the Sea where all things end. And emerge again.”

He searched her face, trying to find some salvation from the decisions he’d made. Dreamlike, she slowly leaned toward him, hearing his muted gasp at the softness of her lips upon his cheeks, his dark lashes, wet, salt like human tears—why would she expect differently—where she kissed away his silent sorrow. His surrending sigh as she chastely brushed his mouth with hers, held the synchronicity of their breath, shared in this precious moment.

When Rhyanon drew back, she seemed as mystified as he, her action leaving them both pensive. Her eyes drifted shut, as she turned from the wonder in Thrawn’s look.

And in those moments where Rhyanon still seemed held by that light first brush of lips, Thrawn, utterly mesmerized, reached toward her, her eyelids fluttering wide as he guided her face close. Before she could tense back, his mouth claimed hers, thirsting, seeking, wanting. Her breath caught in surprise, but she responded, easing to the exploration of lips and tongue, eyes closing once more, lost to the taste of warmth, and the heady euphoria of wandering hands, his arms encompassing her supple form, her hands clinging onto his shoulders and neck… ~ It was said, of the 5 Greatest Kisses in the Galaxy, this one was ranked somewhere in the top 10. A true Cold Mountain performance, as Kaylee might have approximated. Had she been there to witness the Kiss. But because no one of the Serenity crew, or the Wilde Kaarde had any idea what transpired between the biokinetically gifted Keltoi medic, and the former Grand Admiral, now Supreme Commander of the Imperial Remnant united with the Empire of the Hand, and they only found out about it after-the-fact, it was ranked in the top 10, without ever receiving any explicit ordinal denomination.

The Republic Alliance and the Fringe systems of the Terran Core were amid a truce with the Empire of the Hand, but the split of forces on either side of the spatial conduit had delayed progress. The conundrum of truncating communication and travel in the absence of the wormhole left River Tam with a puzzle more entertaining than figuring out how to overcome the thousands of meteors orbiting Coruscant, utilizing the antiquated tracking of spatial aquatonics, accelerated by River’s unique talents. A mind operating in fractal domains, dimensional analytics reducing equations to a few hours, that would have taken the Republic’s best physicists a month, she needed something else now, to keep her distracted, or the sound of Abaddon’s Reaver-Hybrid Clones, never far from her consciousness, might threaten the precarious hold she’d only recently recovered of her sanity after Miranda.

Thus, on that rare evening while Rhyanon and Thrawn continued groping and caressing each other like teenagers riding passion’s hormonal tidal wave, Ar’alani was subjected to learning why Terran humans seemed so obsessed with quoting script-lines from long-dead movies. A favorite of these oft-repeated one-liners: “as you wish,” Jayne, Serenity’s weapons-happy muscle-man, babbled every time Ar’alani drifted somewhere in his general vicinity.

This was the penance for losing the Girls’ Night Drinking Game to Zoe and Saffron—aka Mara Jade. Subjected to Jayne’s movie-night choice of Old Terra’s cinematic selection stored in Serenity’s archives. Who knew a man who strolled through civilian markets with a rocket-launcher on his shoulder because ya’ never knew what fruit-vendor might turn into an assasin indulged a secret fetish for romances.

Resignedly, Ar’alani settled back on the worn cushions of the sofa, housed in a back storage pit of the ramshackle smuggling ship. Serenity gloried in its disarray and disrepair like a flick-off to Talon Kaarde’s well-maintained vessel, and orderly crew.

Stale beer and cigara fumes filtered through the air of Serenity’s makeshift entertainment center, holos projecting what Jayne swore as the greatest movie of all time.

“Want some?” Jayne asked, rattling a bowl of heat-reactive seed kernels under her nose, crunching down on a fluffy piece of styrofoam-looking cellulose lathered in butter and salt.

Ar’alani’s expression puckered at the charred pungency of fumes wafting from the bowl, and altogether overwhelming for the refined senses of Chiss olfactory centers. “No, thank you,” she said, trying to keep the forebearsnce from her voice, seeing Jayne’s puppy-dog eyes. “And if you say, as you wish one more time, I’ll dump those seed kernels—popcorn—“the word awkward from her throat”— over your head.”

A mistake, she realized, quickly learning females speaking in a commanding voice only made Jayne more moon-eyed. Which was enough for Ar’alani to toss back another Ewok microbrew.

Keth roach piss would have tasted sweeter*, she thought spurring another curse at Thrawn for bringing them to this lost twilight realm. The crash site of his old Emperor’s mad battalion of destruction. She chokied down the beverage, because drunk was the only way she could envision sustaining Jayne’s company for the next 2 hours, and hoped whatever involved the Supreme Commander in that moment, it was either thoroughly tormenting or worse, boring to the point of death.

When she learned later, the indulgence that had indeed occupied Thrawn, she had no regret for the data-pad aimed at his head from across the conference desk of his office. Thrawn caught the object effortlessly of course, which irked her all the more. Fuming, Ar’alani stalked out from the office, vowing over her shoulder as she exited between the sliding doors, Thrawn could spend the next movie-night subjected to Jayne’s visual art tastes, his rancid popcorn, and cheap alcohol. She heard the low laughter in her wake, the words, “As you wish,” reaching her as the doors whisked shut.

For a moment, she considered turning back around, marching through the doors, up to Thrawn, glaring fire to match the subtle teasing glint in his eyes. And stuffing as you wish right back at him.

As entertaining as the vision was, of smashing a few more data-pads over Thrawn’s polished composure, Ar’alani prided herself on possessing the rare trait of taking the high-road, as the saying went.

Especially because of the laughter. That had been good to hear. Clean, honest laughter, something like joy and the bravado she recalled when Thrawn had been an infuriating captain under her command.

After all the loss, the death, and decimation swallowing their Galaxy, with Abaddon, and forces of the Coroniad-Virathi [read: my analog to the Grysk, but adapted from the Keltiad verse] still afoot. It was the first time she’d heard that sound from him in decades. And if it took basting the Keltoi medic—Mal Reynolds kept calling her Gaia—in reference to some ancient Terran goddess that recalled Rhyanon’s abilities of organic molecular manipulation. Well, Ar’alani decided, if this was what followed a good basting for Thrawn, it was better than the melancholy devouring him since the Battle of the Event Horizon.

So, she held her peace that day, hope’s candle, a flicker in the storm, but present, wakening for the first time since she’d led the few Chiss survivors to this rendezvous of Endor, fleeing their home-worlds, a cold rage constricting her chest, watching Csilla’s incinerated caracass fade away like a million ashes blasted across the Star-ways.

Hope, that flickering candle in Ar’alani’s mind. She strode down the passage to the main hanger-port, notified of General Skywalker’s return with a new collection of refugees from the Infernal Regions bordering the dimensional rift left by the Wormole’s collapse, dubbed Ginngungagap, after some other archaic Terranism.

Echoing through her mind, with that candle, the words, As you wish, yourself, Vu’rawn.

#Thrawn #Grand Admiral Thrawn #Star Wars #Firefly/Serenity #the Keltiad #Rhyanon ferch Garowen #Ar’alani #AU crossover #Space Opera #omg—my notes are strewn through notebooks in micro writing—oh-and in my IPAD notes…how am I ever going to compose this into coherency #in the way that requires reading on obscure topics and more verse-fanlore than any #Working professional adult ought to be perusing #but so fun #and Thrawn is such a classic romantic tragic icon—I honestly think he fits the Romantic era hero so well

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