Mission of Mercy

[Raif]

The day had finally come. Royston Spektor was on Anaxes, and he was there for one reason only...

To kill Andraste.

In the days since her most recent "outburst," Royston had been working like a man possessed. The plotting, the scheming, the new relationships to be formed with the power-players of the galaxy...in truth, there was still loads and loads of work to be done. Roy could have busied himself with backroom dealings and negotiations for months, but that was the old way. The old him.

No longer was he content to simply pull strings from the shadows. Today, he would be getting his hands dirty. It was, without a doubt, the most difficult endeavor he had ever undertaken. But there was no backing out now.

He'd been on the capital world for just over 24 hours at this point, and he'd been quite busy in that time. Getting planet-side hadn't been difficult, of course, thanks to his shapeshifting abilities. Once he'd landed, he'd immediately set to work re-acquainting himself with the palace's security protocols - many of whom he either A) helped instituted to begin with or B) still held access to thanks to his familiarity with the network. Being the head of the Ubiqtorate and the Empress' Spymaster held many benefits that didn't stop simply because he no longer held the official title.

Come to think of it, that's more than likely why most Spymasters ended their tenure in a body bag and not in a retirement ceremony.

Either way, the prep work was done. Time to do the damn thing.

As he walked through the passageways of the Imperial Palace in the skin of a guard, it took every ounce of his train to not recheck the bindings of his wrist holsters for the umpteenth time. Sporting one on each wrist, they each held a blade made entirely from ceramic and polymer, thus sidestepping any potential pitfalls via metal detectors.

In addition, just in case a sharp blade cutting through the carotid artery wasn't enough to get the job done, each knife was coated in a powerful and fast-acting neurotoxin. Just in case.

Of course, even that may not be enough to stop the monster that wore the face of Andraste - a face that he could not, and would not, ever fully stop loving.

You're doing this for her, Roy, just remember that. She died long ago, and what's left is...a monster.

He may not be anyone's definition of a white knight - in fact, most who knew Royston Spektor would laugh out loud at any such comparison - but shining armor or no, he was going to slay the beast who held so much of the galaxy in fear.

Or, of course, he would die trying. Yeah, that was a pretty likely outcome as well.

 

[Sreeya]

She paid no heed to her surroundings, having walked away from the chaos she had just inflicted upon her own people. Her heart, whatever there was left, pounded against her chest. Her white eyes returned to their hawk-like yellow, her slender fingers tightly gripping the nearest railing to her. She was shivering, visibly shaking as if under an epileptic attack. Andraste found comfort in the solitude, the single taunt from the public replaying within her mind over and over again. She gazed upon a mirror, upon the gaunt pale face that stared back at her. Dark circles were under her eyes, her cheekbones close to popping out of her skin because she was so thin. Her lips were almost devoid of color. However, in her eyes there was something she hadn't seen in many years...fear. It was pure, unadulterated terror.

Emotion.

It was something she had locked away for what seemed like decades, and here it was threatening to burst through. Rage had been all she had known, or worse, indifference. She had little care for anyone, even herself. She thrived only off of toying with the Force and manipulating it to her will. The eyes in the mirror made her uncomfortable, made her doubt and question. Too many images formed in her mind, too many of a small infant, too many of the tendrils of memory she had buried. She gazed at the mirror and screamed at the top of her lungs. The mirror shattered to a thousand pieces.

The scream carried all throughout the palace, and through the Force. It was one of despair, like nails raking across a chalkboard to those that could hear through the Force. Andraste screamed at the top of her lungs, slamming her hands into the wall and falling to the ground in a heap. When Royston would burst in, she would be on the ground, screaming still, tears freely flowing down her ghoulish features. It was unlike anything he would have seen before.

 

[Raif]

He moved through the palace like a wraith, completely undetectable thanks to his natural abilities, his Force abilities, and his familiarity with the palace itself. He was keeping his Force presence completely muted, one of his specialties, and so thankfully he was slightly shielded from the psychic shock that ripped through the complex as Andraste lost control.

Still, though, it rocked him plenty - his first instinct was to run to her, to help her, to defend her from whatever was causing her such pain. He'd loved her for so long, it was almost impossible to turn those feelings off, even with everything that had happened between them.

It lasted only a heartbeat, though. He took a deep breath, physically steeling himself for what he had to do. He rushed forward through the last few meters of the servant's passage, emerging like a vengeful spirit into Andraste's antechamber. One of the poisoned blades was in his hand like a flash, his arm cocked back and ready to unleash its deadly payload with lethal accuracy. His eyes moved rapidly, searching for his target, nerves primed and ready for the kill...

And then he saw her there.

An eternity passed in an instant for Royston Spektor. He was blessed with a rare gift - sometimes, many times, a curse - to remember almost every detail of every moment that's ever happened in his life. In that moment, he rewound through everything.

The first time he'd met her, the young Andraste had impossibly bypassed an extraordinarily complex telekinetic lock to enter his personal chambers on Korriban and fiddle with his antiques. He'd found her there, completely at ease and wondering over an old mechanical music box. It was as if he'd intruded on her personal space, rather than the other way around.

That memory and millions of others flashed across his mind, the memory of his Andraste bursting from his mind.

And, surprising though it may seem, it was these thoughts that triggered his action, his throwing arm whirring forward in a blur as the knife launched toward the mess of a woman huddled on the floor. An anguished cry ripped forward from the would-be assassin's throat as he moved, the raw emotion accompanying the noise comparable with Andraste's own scream moments before.

As the deadly weapon left his fingertips, the broken man would have gladly plunged the second blade into his own heart rather than do what he was doing now. He was a man torn - he had readied himself to slay the monster, not put down the rabid, dying dog.

He didn't want to kill her.

But he had to.

 

[Sreeya]

The blade shot through the air, but it was never intended as a fatal blow. Try as he might, Royston couldn't muster it, at least not immediately. The blade did, however, cut into the side of her arm, whizzing past and drawing blood. The neurotoxin began to course through her veins almost immediately. Andraste had been far too compromised to have stopped the blade, but she was immediately aware of what was happening. The monster in her leaped to defense, the Force methodically working to destroy the poison now rapidly coursing through her.

Meanwhile, tears kept flowing freely from her. She clutched at the ground, clawing into it, howling in both pain and sorrow. She slowly gazed up at Royston, to where he would see that same fear she had seen in herself. She gasped and shuddered, her mind split between pushing the poison aside and also reigning in emotions. She couldn't do both at once, and it allowed a part of her to seep through that hadn't in decades. Andraste locked eyes with Royston.

"What have I done.."

She closed her eyes and rested her head against the wall, bleeding freely from her arm.

"What the hell have I done? I have so much power. I am Empress. I am God. I have it all. And yet..yet I feel so weak."

She paused for a long moment.

"...She would be like me. Same boisterous and mischievous persona. She had his eyes, but only in color. She had my smile, back when I did such a thing. She has my blood through her veins. She is everything I had failed to be."

Andraste laughed bitterly, opening her eyes again.

"You can't kill me, Royston. I can't kill myself. It's a curse. I'm cursed to exist. Cursed to be such a plague upon the galaxy. And nothing will stop me...nothing except for her. One cannot survive while the other lives. Such is my destiny with her. You have a part to play in this. You know this."

 

[Raif]

Hands balled into fists, jaw clenched, Roy stared in a mix of silent rage and shock as he saw a side of Andraste that he'd thought long burned away by the madness and darkness. As she spoke the wound on her arm seemed to almost bubble and fester as the toxin battled with her Force-enhanced self-preservation abilities.

Her words were like salt in an open wound, talking about her daughter. What features she shared with him...

Royston would have given anything for the child out there, the child at the middle of a storm the size of which she couldn't even comprehend, to have been his. The thought hit him like a flash as the thing that was once Andraste laughed and taunted him. Spoke of his part in this mess, and the part her daughter would play. Spoke with barely-hidden menace about the threat that her daughter posed.

Roy advanced steadily towards where the woman was slumped on the ground, and outside the palace the Imperial City would begin to be buffeted and rocked by a rapidly-forming and ominous-looking storm. The former Spymaster had always been gifted with the manipulation of weather, and this wouldn't be the first time his ill temper was expressed in the form of a darkening of the sky.

Those instances had been pebbles before the mountain, though, compared to the Force storm brewing at the command of Roy's subconscious. Inside the palace a storm of a different kind was brewing, though, as Roy gathered energy into his hands. He knew that the Empress was using the Force to block the neurotoxin - attacking her with the Force, then, would hopefully distract her focus long enough for the poison to do it's work.

Lightning crackled over the man's knuckles, but rather than launch his attack he blinked in apparent surprise as words began pouring forth from his mouth.

"You used to be...I have loved you every moment of every day since I first met you. But what you've become now..."

Roy struggled to swallow, his mouth suddenly dry as the dunes of Tatooine as he spoke.

"Every second that you draw breath is an insult to the memory of the woman I loved. For her, I have to..."

Again, his voice caught in his parched throat, and he struggled to finish his thought.

"I'm going to kill you. I have to."

The smell of ozone filled the antechamber as the electrical energy in his hands continued to arc and spit. But, at least for the moment, Royston was frozen, poised on the precipice of killing the woman he loved - but unable to take that final step.

 

[Sreeya]

"Have to? Yes. Should? Most likely. But will you?"

She grimaced at him.

"No."

She continued to fight the toxin, making no move to attack. She had seen the lightning, and she knew what he was capable of. Just as he was well aware of what she was capable of. She looked down at the blood flowing from her wound.

"The chaos was always there. You loved it too. And you still do. It's a curse, just like my existence. I am your Achilles heel, don't you get it? And mine..."

Andraste spat at the ground.

"Mine is my daughter."

She had followed his line of thought.

"She was not born out of love. I had been a prisoner...brainwashed. And she was a product of that. Whatever good in me passed into her, and the malice from her father also. They negated one another. When she was born, she had an entirely neutral aura to her being. It was balance in the most beautiful form I had seen. She came from both chaos and harmony at once. I took her to a Jedi hoping they could do with her what they failed to do with me. Because the monster that existed within me did not reside in her. For me it came from my lineage. For all the sins of my father..of what I later came to know. It was imbued into me. It was hate, guilt and malice all into me. And so this monster came to be."

Andraste manipulated Force, a bit more expertly now. The poison was beginning to fade.

"You loved me more than you ever should have. And you've become a monster yourself. Look at you. You have been hiding your whole life. You ran from everything, pulling the strings from the shadows. You always sought to be righteous to justify actions that were ultimately for your own self gain. You flirted with every side in the war for your benefit."

She slowly rose to stand.

"I have the courage at least to stand on my pedestal and atop the pile of shit I've created. You have been sneaking away from yours this entire time. No, Royston, you loved me and you still do because we are bound by our twisted ideas of justice. You love me because I make you feel at home, find solace in the twisted being you truly are. You can be with Jedi..or anyone else, and at your very core you will always be a manipulator. You will always be fragmented."

Andraste strode over to the broken mirror.

"Do you have the courage to look upon yourself and see what you've become? The spiral you've gone down? The hell you've paved in your wake?"

 

[Raif]

Royston stood there as she spoke her harsh words, well aware that the toxin was losing its potency by the minute. He was also well aware of the fact that he was rapidly approaching a sort of 'point of no return' - if he didn't kill her, he would have to escape, and do it quickly.

And yet, still he stood there.

His attention was rapt as she spoke of her daughter, and a hint of deja vu passed over him, reminding him of a similar feeling he'd had the first time he'd met Andraste. He would remember what she said no matter what, but in this instance he got the impression it would later prove to be important.

She began speaking of his shadowy nature, his instinct to find the personal profit or benefit in anything he did. She was right of course, and in the past this sort of dressing down was exactly the thing that had kept him in line. He'd denied his nature, been shamed by it...

But that was then. He was a different man now, and he'd found through embracing who and what he was, he'd been able to find a way to use it for the greater good.

Against her.

He walked towards her at the mirror, sending out a quick pulse of Force energy to block any potential audio or visual surveillance devices. As he stood behind her looking into the mirror he changed smoothly from his human to his Clawdite face, his eyebrow cocked slightly.

"You think you still know me, but you've no idea what I've become without you. I no longer hide from myself - and I'm fully aware of the hell I've created. I'm not expecting salvation. The galaxy I'm trying to help build - a galaxy without your darkness in it - it's got no place in it for people like me. But that doesn't mean I can't help make it happen nonetheless."

An old saying passed through his mind at that moment, and he cocked a slight grin.

"They say a man grows great when he plants trees whose shade he knows he'll never sit in. I'm just here planting a tree..."

As soon as he said the word tree, he couldn't help but think of a flower. Andraste'd loved flowers...both the kind he grew and the very different sort she could grow. He grimaced, almost shaking his head in frustration as he tried to remove the memories from his mind.

And still he stood, energy gathered but unreleased.