Of Reminiscence

[Toska]

The sun beat a crimson glow over rocky crags, shifting its yolk onto vegetation that waned beyond the palisades, beyond Gabriel's meandering gait. The man, doused black in robes, swathed in satin clothes and khaki trousers, left his ship and clung to a certain isolation. With guards striking surveillance at the palace's gates, with walls and towers and the blue holographic glow of warmth etched onto them, his solitude was relative. Disquiet surrounded him, cloaked in airs of posterity. Narrow eyes beckoned him with suspicion.

They saw him for a shell. Face drawn tight, hair streaked with gray. Crow dancing with glee beneath his eyes, dragging their feet into murders that tore the youth from his countenance. A cane tapped with him. Held often at the crook of an elbow, tucked away until he deemed it necessary to touch the silver gilt til to the ground, to click for the guards' annoyance.

Gabriel, whose name meant nothing. Allowed on order. A rare bustle from a lesser used entrance; the way he held his peace, kept silent as he was escorted up the stairs, into the palace's inner recesses wracked him with causality. An unknown. Searched, stricken, watched. Given right of passage and little else.

A wan smile touched his eyes. The doors to Andraste's palace opened for him. Reminiscence, even as it burned in his veins, bled him of courage, was sweet. Flowed viscous over cracked lips, crooned from a dry throat.

He introduced himself with a lowered gaze, offering a knee before his lady of darkness. When he rose, it was to wait.

"Perhaps you will forgive my request," he said. "It has been long."

 

[Andraste OG]

For the first time in decades, Andraste was speechless. She simply stared, her golden eyes wide with visible shock. She could sense any entity with the Force, and yet she had been in denial of this one. She had last seen him over 20 years ago, when she had been little more than a teenager. When she had been human.

The woman standing before him today was unrecognizable. Her skin was chalk white, her face sunken with dark bags under her now golden eyes. She looked frail, almost weak, and yet she pulsated with unseen strength. He would feel the difference between the lost girl he had known before and the monster that stood in her place now.

Quietly, she took steps towards him, the look of shock never leaving her face. She reached down and grasped him by the shoulders to lift him up to his feet.

“You do not bow before me.”

She didn’t recognize her own words. Her mouth opened and closed, searching for what to say. Slowly, a shaky hand reached out to touch the side of his face.

“G-Gabe…is it really you?”

She thought she had been dreaming. He was a figment of her imagination. He was a shard from her past, when everything else had been washed away. In him she could see so many memories from decades ago. In him she saw Silas, Apollo, Vereor, Casimir, Iniquitous and so many others from a time long ago. It was as if a completely different reality existed and he had crawled out from it.

“Where have you been? And…why did you come back?”

Surely he had known what she had become.

 

[Toska]

The gaunt features that graced his countenance filtered to a smile. Hollow. A shell of his youth; lost to the bend of time, gray beyond his years. The sweet pulse of life a now dull thrum in his veins. What once moved with alacrity had slowed, paled, and Andraste's own fragility was mirrored.

Gabriel, what he had become, an amalgamation of a man. Her cautious touch found his cheek, traced the line of his jaw. A thing of the past, ghosts come back to rest.

He nodded.

"I wished to see you again, Andraste," he said, voice above a whisper. Spoken as much thought in the ebb of her touch. The lucidity that gripped him kept him firm. Standing before her, elevated at such a familiar perch. The name that had burned so brightly behind his eyes, finally within his grasp. A warmth, flickering candlelight that it was, he had forgotten.

"Where have I been..." An echo. "Dathomir. As when we were children, running amidst the trees. The story is long. Will you entertain it for me?"

 

[Andraste OG]

“See me? Why would you ever wish to do that?”

She closed her eyes and turned away from him.

“I’m not Andraste anymore. I don’t know who I am. Nobody calls me that anymore. Only Empress..”

He had seen her at her weakest, before she had even imagined herself as a higher ranking member within Sith, let alone the Empress. He had seen her when she was still a teenager, when they both got into childish trouble.

“It was a century ago, when I knew you. I should have run away. I’ve caused so much destruction, Gabriel. I’ve brought about so much chaos and despair. It consumes my mind every waking moment. I hear the dying screams of all those lives I took on Coruscant. The galaxy thinks of me as a merciless monster without weakness. Yet I’m exhausted..tormented...”

She did not know why she spoke like this. Perhaps it was because he was the only remaining thread to her past. The only one that would see her as something other than Empress. Her expression was pained, her yellow eyes glinting with the faintest traces of humanity.

Andraste used the Force to float over two wine glasses, pouring them a glass each. She noted his visage, also haunted and a shadow of his former self. They had both gone through trials that had taken them past their breaking point. She sipped from her glass, looking out into the open courtyard. It overlooked the rest of the city below, and it vaguely reminded her of being on a ship as it hovered over Coruscant. Right before she destroyed it.

“Tell me. Tell me your long story.”

She cast him a sideways glance. It was this odd, alien feeling. One she hadn’t felt in many years. She couldn’t tell if it was relief or hints of happiness. Yet simply the sight of him had invoked something in her.

 

[Toska]

Quietly: "You are yet Andraste, my Empress, both." His gaze fell to the glass set before him, plucked it out of the air and into his hand. Drinking from it, a sweet, long gulp. Liquid coursed over his lips, staining him its oily pallor. A soothing sensation, cool against the dry silence of his throat. One to cleanse the hesitation that vied against the telling.

Here, amidst the palace of Anaxes. The first steps he took into Imperial service; just as his youth, the first person to catch his eye, a solace that broke any temporal boundary. He smiled, softly.

The same now as before, and still Andraste was the one in front of him.

"You have heard of Lecchamemnon, former Grandmaster of the Jedi Order?" A familiar name. Decades old, older than the recollections of some who walked the same halls of their past. "I returned to the Empire under a certain lord's asylum. Along with another... Caleb, perhaps, yes, Caleb. The man we met on Dathomir so long ago. We were tasked to infiltrate the Order, to ply their Masters for information. Acknowledged as runaway Acolytes, standing before their Council, we were deemed fit for entrance, and given to the manhunter, Lecchamemnon for tutelage."

Another sip of wine, glass cupped between delicate, skeletal fingers. "With the former Grandmaster, we found Casimir." A gaze cast up, livid in the retelling. Livid with remembrance. Fond. Foul. Conflict tore its way over his brow.

"He had become an abomination."

 

[Andraste OG]

“Casimir? He’s alive?”

She had always wondered where the boy had gone. He faded shortly before Gabriel himself disappeared. She wondered if her life would have taken a different course if..

“..none of you had disappeared. Perhaps I never would have fallen under Exodeus’ trap. Perhaps I never would have ascended to become Empress. Perhaps Coruscant would stand today.”

She offered him a faint grin, raising her glass.

“I hold you partially responsible. You escaped to whatever nightmare you found and managed not to kill entire populations of people.”

Andraste gazed off into the distance, for a moment thinking on nothing but sounds of water behind them. It was graceful, as if all was well with the world. Flowers adorned the chambers and the courtyard, something she had regained her passion for after many years.

“You’ve returned at a less than pleasing time for the Imperium. The rebellion has struck blow after blow against us.”


She downed the wine, pouring herself some more.


“I think about running away sometimes. Would you join?”

 

[Toska]

"I returned to see you," he said, catching her gaze, "not out of loyalty to this empire." Soft at the eyes, smiling in that hollow light. Too serene by half. Their skin, ghostly now, and stricken gaunt over the years. Their eyes, bubbling with the hints of corruption that manifested after dipping too deeply into the Force's own chalice. Power that drew its blade, scarring visages beyond the kiss of youth.

Quietly: "Entire populations? No, but atrocities... Onderon had lost much of its luster. I lost myself, there, embedded into their court. Chased ghosts through their halls. Their queen... ironic how her name held such similarity to yours." Less than a whisper, a murmur that parted from his lips surreptitiously.

Here, in this court. Experiences they shared on scales that resonated with the past's taste. A scent so wild it drew his gaze away; downcast, his feet became reality enough for him to bear.

"If it is your desire, Empress. Andraste. It would be my pleasure to escape with you."

 

[Andraste OG]

Andraste’s eyebrows raised at his answer. She couldn’t stop it before it happened. It was a burst of laughter, one that echoed throughout the halls of her chamber. It was an alien sound, one that the guards had never heard.

She continued laughing, plopping down on the edge of an infinity pool that overlooked the city below. She continued to drink, the grin still on her face. She dipped her feet into the water.

“Do you remember that night we got drunk by the fire? Then Andelka was there completely confused?”

Andraste had to bite her cheek to keep from laughing out loud.

“Or when we were fighting against the higher ranked Sith that got into a tiff over a flower?”

It was as if it had happened a century ago. Slowly, the smile faded from her face, replaced with the mask she wore so often. She sighed loudly.

“I can’t run away, Gabriel. I’m so far gone from that time. The time of laughter, humanity and not being bound by my destiny. You can still escape it. Get out of this war, Gabriel. Forge your own path and find happiness within yourself.”

 

[Toska]

Gabriel cocked a brow at that. The burst of laughter, the sudden reminiscence. A swarm of memories that fell from her lips like drunken bees tumbling up and out seeking purchase, affirmation. Recollection so thick it waxed poetic on his ears; fondly, a whisper of a smile ghosting his lips.

"I do remember," he said. Looking out towards the city, beneath the palace. Away, always away. An escape in itself that wanted for nothing more than to want. Want for, wanting.

It lent to the sobriety that filled them. That had Andraste, languid on her perch, sighing so wistfully of the past. Of what she had become.

Gabriel shook his head. "I returned seeking my own happiness." He caught her eyes, caught the nostalgia that hung on the eaves of her lips.

"I care little for this war. I am too enfeebled now to fight alongside our former peers. Instead, I came to see you, nothing more."

 

[Andraste OG]

Andraste was not one to be confused, and yet his answers brought nothing but questions. Nobody talked to her like this, nobody stood before her so bare and fearless, yet weak at the same time. She circled the water with her toes, the quiet wind of the night brushing her black curls to the side.

“Do you even recognize me? Do you see my eyes? These are not the eyes you knew.”

She did not want to understand what had possessed him to find her again. All she knew was that he was a thread to the past she had fondly tucked away forever. It was painful and warm at the same time, filling her with little slivers of emotion she hadn’t dared to experience.

“Well now you’re here. Standing before me. What now? Will you go back into the shadows?”

It was like she was meeting him for the first time all over again. They had been but teenagers when they were trapped in all sorts of adventures. That was when her heart beat furiously, when he made her nervous and sent jolts of strange emotions through her. She wasn’t capable of much of this the way she was now, and yet he invoked faint traces of something she couldn’t understand.