Cat's in the Cradle

[Retroboy]

Hareth saw Bria move past her, and she wondered how much the woman had heard. However, she was content to wallow in her misery. Her own mother didn't love her? How was one supposed to cope with that? How was she supposed to live with the idea that her mother had never even loved her, even when she was born? Was it something wrong with Hareth? She wasn't full Arkanian. Would her mother had been able to love her if she had pure blood? Or was it really just something wrong with Narina Maruhi, like the defect in the brain she mentioned?

Then, she heard two blaster shots. Hareth didn't need to guess what had happened, but she didn't want to believe it. A rising nausea started to well up from her core. She rose shakily, and hurried into the building once more. She didn't really feel anything. She just sort of felt numb. She looked down at the smoking corpse of her mother, and then to Bria. She could swear that she saw Doctor yelling at her, but all she really heard was her heart thudding in her ears. This was wrong. This couldn't be real.

She knelt down next to her mother, moving to brush her hair out of her face. She had always hated having hair in her face. She tried to ignore the fact that there was now a hole there. She tried to ignore the fact that she was so very still now. Her hand wandered to her wrist, and she felt for a pulse. She knew she wouldn't find one, but some sick compulsion made her check anyway. Maybe to just torture herself a little more. Her thumb brushed her mother's hand. It was callused and had pits from all the chemical scars. Just like Hareth remembered. She wanted to ask Doctor to fix this. He couldn't fix this. No one in the whole Galaxy could fix this.

There were powers within the Force that could bring her back. That could make her love Hareth. But she didn't have them, and by the time she learned them, they'd be useless. She was still so very weak. Why had Bria done this? Why had the Galaxy done this to her? It was sick. It was so incredibly sick. Her hand tightened around her mother's, and she didn't realize it but she hadn't blinked since she saw the woman's corpse. She hadn't even made a noise. She brought the woman's hand up to her cheek, putting it on hers. She could feel the warmth retreating out of Narina Maruhi's lifeless body.

Well, looks like you're alone again, Hareth, she thought. She laughed at that thought. Or did she cry? It was hard to tell.

Hareth let the hand go. It fell from her face. She sucked in a breath through her nose. Why did she care? Her mother had told her she never loved her.

Because I thought I could still make her love me, a voice chided in her head. Because I'm stupid. No one's ever going to love me. No one ever has. Not even the person who was supposed to.

She wanted to cry, but she couldn't. She couldn't summon the will to do it. She simply wanted to no longer exist. Even dying wasn't good enough. She wanted to be unmade. Perhaps then things could have gone differently. Things could have been better if she wasn't born, for everybody. Her mother, her master... Hell, maybe even Bria's life was somehow ruined by her presence. Destiny knew she was going to interact with the woman and screwed her over pre-emptively. Why not? It seemed about cruel enough to match up with everything else that had happened in her life.

"This wasn't how it was supposed to go," she said finally, looking up at her two companions. There was something missing in the way she spoke and in her stare, as if someone had reached inside her and snuffed her internal fire. "You were supposed to like her. She was supposed to love me. Why don't things go right?"

 

[Outlander]

The lingering anger died down, reduced to a dull droning deep within her. The world snapped back into clarity. Doctor berrating her. Hareth checking the corpse. She wouldn't understand why she did it. Not today. Maybe not ever. But Bria had to do it. Someone like that, who couldn't even lie to make her daughter feel better, didn't deserve to breath the same air they did.

Family was everything. Turning your back on family was unforgivable.

"Hareth." Bria said, ignoring Doctor and kneeling down to meet her eyes. "That woman wasn't fit to be your mother. She wasn't fit to live. She turned her back on you because of her bad decisions and bullshit expectations. You're strong despite her, not because of her, and I know you'll keep being strong now."

 

[Retroboy]

Hareth wanted to hate Bria right now. But she couldn't even muster that. What was even the point? Wouldn't change anything. She looked back down at her mother again. Bria tried to give her something of a pep talk, but Hareth's heart wasn't really in it. But she did say something interesting. Something that gave Hareth at the very least enough will to address the commander.

"I'm not strong," Hareth said. "I've never been strong." She hand her hand over the wound in her mother's torso. "If I was strong, this wouldn't have happened. She would have loved me. I would've made her. As long as I'm not strong, I'm always going to be alone."

She gripped Narina's labcoat. "You hate me, Doctor hates me, even my own mother hated me," she said, and the beakers and test tubes began to shake around her. "Everyone hates me. But if I just get stronger I can change so much. I could bring back the dead. I could break armies, bend minds and hearts. Crush the Sith. People would have to love me then." With each passing second, the shaking in the room got worse.

One of the beakers burst, shattered by the rage and despair emanating out of Hareth. Then, as soon as the shaking started, it stopped. Hareth hung her head, looking around at all the work her mother had created. The neatly made stacks of papers. The test tubes. Clearly, decades of research had piled up here. Now, it was all useless. She knew her mother wrote in code, and Hareth hadn't learned it. With Narina dead, there was no point to even coming here. Another sick joke to be played.

"I don't want to be alone..."

 

[Outlander]

Bria gave her a hug.

She didn't think about it. About how she was giving a hug to an emotionally damaged, highly dangerous, young woman. No matter what brought her here, she was one of Bria's people. She didn't deserve this. She didn't deserve to be broken and alone in this world. And Bria knew what that was like. Even if she coped, she knew what that was like every day of her life. And she couldn't let others go through the same fate; not while they were under her protection.

"You're not alone, and I don't hate you. You're perfect just the way you are, and I wouldn't want it any other way."

 

[Retroboy]

All the rage and self-loathing flowed out of Hareth as she felt Bria's arms around her. There was a sensation of confusion. Of all the people who would hold her like this, Hareth would have never expected someone like Bria Tsuani to be one of them. Bria had been so cold, so angry with her. Bria had broken her rib when they had first met and threatened to leave her exposed to the elements. Bria who was always yelling at her. She genuinely had believed that Bria had hated her more than anyone on the ship.

The thoughts melted as she began to weep. She cried so much lately. Over such small, silly things. A television show, a few needles. It reminded her of how weak and small she felt all the time. She wasn't powerful, she was just a little girl playing at Dark Lord.

Right now it didn't matter. She leaned into Bria, hugging the woman back. You're perfect the way you are, Bria had said to her. Oh, how Hareth wanted to believe that. In her stronger moments, she repeated it to herself so very much. It was a mantra to convince herself she was superior, a woman of power she had earned rather than something she had merely lucked into by a chance of birth. It was a manta that melted very easily when the stress of what she had gone through caught up to her.

The ultimate fact was that even if Bria didn't hate her, Hareth hated herself.

She felt tired. The crying, the rage, the horror of what she had experienced today was too much. She wanted to collapse here and now. Her eyes half-lidded, red-rimmed from crying, she looked at Bria.

"I want to go back to the Asylum..."

 

[Asteroid]

Doctor gaged as he rolled up to the now deceased scientist's computer. Listening to this sappy spectical in the other room was physically making him sick and he didn't know how much of it he could stomach before he hurled. Fortunately the sappiness seemed to begin to wind down as he logged into the computer and began transferring its files to an external hard drive. He reclined in the comfortable leather chair as he watched the download bar creep across the screen, caressing the wooden and undoubtably expensive piece of furniture as he spun around. "Hey Bria!" He yelled from the other room. "Help me get this chair back to the ship!"
@Outlander​

 

[Outlander]

"OK." Bria said, pulling away from the girl. Hareth looked so vulnerable; more vulnerable than she'd ever seen her, even including when she'd tortured her when they first met on the Asylum. This was the girl she tried to keep covered up from the world. The scared, vulnerable, child. And Bria couldn't hate that. Never. "Let's head back to the ship. We'll be back home soon. I'm sure Doctor can finish things up by himself." She wasn't actually sure of that. Even as she was leading Hareth out, he was complaining about a chair or something. But this took priority. And she'd be sure to send a signal back before they left to get another team here to load up whatever they could find in the lab.

Bria took Hareth's hand, leading her out of the place. As she left, she noticed that the Sith woman had finally died, her corpse lying on the floor, in a very similar position as Narina.