There was something hiding in the fog.
Whispers and wisps of the past danced through the haze and flitted across the waves, accompanied by their soft rushing. There was a promise in the salty air, words spoken long ago and then discarded, forgotten.
A voice tore through a veil, and called her back into the world.
"Null!"
She felt a pair of hands again, on her arms, shaking her softly. They were not like the hands that had dragged her out of the darkness. She gave in willingly, and let herself be pulled along.
"Null, wake up!"
She opened her eyes and stared up at Lars, who was kneeling next to her in the sand.
"Oh finally!" he exclaimed, but there was something unexpected in his voice.
Something underneath the relief. It was anger, she realized.
"What... happened?" she asked, as she sat up and looked around.
They were back at the beach, but it was daytime. There was dense fog all around them, and the sand felt wet and cold. A chill began to seep into her bones and she shivered.
"Guards," he just said, "I got sloppy with the hack when..."
She gripped his hand hard as the memory came back to her. The wooden door. The room. The terminal. A sum of money and folder filled with files about a girl who had died on Thanatos 3.
And who had been brought back.
"What happened then?" she asked, her voice strained.
"You.... you happened!"
He jumped to his feet, and she was certain of it now. He was angry, for the first time ever since she had met him. She stared up at him wide eyed, and he stared back down, his fists clenched and his black eyes overflowing with that emotion, and with pain.
"You just... shut me in!" he snapped.
"I did... what?" She blinked at him, baffled.
"You shut me in, into that dark space where there's no time!" His voice was loud, he was almost yelling now. "It took me forever to get out- I mean... well..."
He fell silent again and heaved a weary sigh. Nothing made any sense, to neither of them.
"I don't remember that," she said sheepishly.
He clenched his teeth, and then he kneeled down next to her again and took her face in both of his hands.
"Look at me," he commanded.
And when she did, she plunged into the darkness of his eyes. She could see the memory through them, but also her own, as she had been in control of the body.
They had both stared at the images on the screen, unable to move, to say something, or even to think something. Behind them, there had been steps. The noise of heavy boots on expensive parquet. And the clang and clutter of heavy duty combat armor.
"Freeze!" One of the guards shouted. "Get up and step away from that terminal. Slowly!"
She got up, slowly, and raised her hands. She turned around, and they found themselves face to face with seven members of the Aenara Guard.
"What the fuck..." one of them exclaimed.
When they spotted her face, and her pitch black eye, they knew.
"Careful! She broke into here... who knows what she's capable of!"
"We should shoot her right here on the spot! Just to be sure!"
"Or... we could pick her clean and sell the pieces..."
She closed her eyes.
Lars, she said inside their mind, I am very sorry.
For what?
It seems like this will end like it began. And even in the same place.
What are you talking about?
He stirred inside her, distraught, in an attempt to gain control over the body to help her. But she pulled him into the black space, the timeless space, to talk to him.
I am so glad I got to meet you, Lars, and be with you.
Null, stop it, we have to get back out there, we have to do something, come up with a plan.
There is nothing we can do any longer, it's over. At her words, she seemed to grow heavier, her energy turning into gravity that seemed to pull on the darkness surrounding them.
But I won't let them have you, Lars. You've still got a chance, she said.
What? No, Null, stop this! There is always a way! We can still fight! He wanted to scream at her, but there was no air in this space, and he had no voice.
No, we can't. We're in no shape to fight after what I did on Hestia. But I can still save you. You will be fine... you have a chance at surviving this, inside this space that was once yours.
He came to understand it then – what this was, this space. This darkness in the farthest corner of her mind. It was the place that he had come from. Where he had slept before he had awoken with her.
Null, this is insane, you can't just-
I have to, Lars. I'm sorry. We've suffered enough. They're either going to shoot us, or...
She paused for a moment.
I will make sure that they can't do anything worse. And if I don't manage, then... well at least you won't have to see it.
No, Null, I -
He wanted to protest, he wanted to grab her and yell at her, but he was just energy in this space. And she became even heavier, and he felt his own energy, his self, being pulled into the center of the dark space. One last time, he felt her as her energy seemed to reverberate and resonate with his, and then she disappeared, leaving him behind, alone in the darkness.
Back on the beach, Null snapped out of the vision he had shown her and recoiled in horror.
"It took me forever to get out of there and find you here!" he hissed at her. "Can you imagine what that felt like?"
"I... just did..." she whispered, averting her eyes.
"We could have fought back! I could have taken over! I could have helped you! Why didn't you let me help you?"
She covered her mouth with her hands, and then buried her whole face in them.
"I don't know..." she muttered, trembling from the cold and the lingering emotions of his memory. "I just... I just thought... I thought I could save you..."
Next to her, Lars sighed.
"You're a colossal idiot Null," he said. His voice was still strained, but softer now. "You're... like a Leviathan class idiot."
She wanted to laugh at his joke, she really did – but instead she just burst into uncontrollable sobbing. She didn't look up, but she felt how he pulled her into his lap and close to his chest, and wrapped his arms around her. His warmth stopped her from shivering.
"Sorry..." he whispered against her hair. "I'm still a bit new to some of these emotions. They're so much more... visceral than what I used to experience. I was just so angry because..."
"I wanted to save you," she cut him off, between her sobs, "Because I feel responsible for... for getting you into all of this... mess. It' my fault that you have to be here, that you have to share this body, that I keep getting hurt and keep dragging into trouble wherever I go.
"You? You think you're the one getting me into trouble?" he interjected, sounding amused.
"I just thought..." she continued, "If I lock you back into the CPU in the brain before we both die, you'd have another chance... to end up somewhere... better."
"I... I guess I understand the sentiment," he said after a while. "I'd do anything in my power to try and protect you, too, but... I don't think it would have worked. Please don't try it again, ever. "
"Why?" she asked. "Why wouldn't it have worked?"
"Because at this point, there is as much of myself in the organic parts of your brain as there is of you in the machine parts," he explained. "After all, by now it seems you're even in control of that timeless space that used to be my CPU. And I, well..."
He sighed and hugged her closer, squeezing a breath out of her that she didn't really need anyway, because this place was just in their mind. But she was thankful that it felt so real. She shifted in his embrace, put her arms around him too, and rested her head against his shoulder.
"I think I'm beginning to really understand what it means to be human... and that organic indecisiveness, too," he said, and as she looked up, his brow was creased.
"What are you indecisive about?" she asked.
"About... what I thought I knew about your past," he said quietly, "And about..."
"Riga," she finished his sentence.
The images they had found in that folder threatened to well up from below, and she forced them down. She still couldn't actually recall any of it happening, but the images themselves seemed to have etched themselves into Lars' perfect memory. She could feel him tense up as they both tried their best not to fully recall any of it, and they both fell silent.
"I don't understand it," she said, after a while. "How is it possible? How can a person love you and still do all these horrible things that he-"
"I have been contemplating that same question. And I think it is because on that day, on Thanatos 3... the girl he loved had died," Lars said. "And the girl that came back was not the same, no matter how much he had hoped she would be. And so, in a way, the man he had been had probably died with her. The man he was when we left is not the same as the man in the pictures."
"So that's what you're indecisive about," she realized. "And that's why you were so angry. Because... you understand him?"
"To... an extent..." he just said.
She wondered what it was that she herself felt. At first, there had been shock and utter horror at the thought. She couldn't, didn't want to believe the images she had seen could be really true. It seemed so wrong, so impossible. And yet, she had seen her past self, and she had looked so happy. Happy with the man who had held her captive for years, abused her, done unspeakable things to her. It all made no sense.
But she realized that she wasn't angry. She had never really been. She had been afraid of him, she had, in a way, learned to hate him, but once she had left this place, she hadn't looked back once. She had come to the conclusion that Riga was just another asshole, another bastard, just a different order of magnitude. Yet she had killed others, for less. Other bastards and assholes that had thought they could mess with her. But she had never thought about going back to get revenge on Riga.
She didn't feel angry even now, just overall dreadful, and confused.
"But why didn't he just let me go?" she asked.
"Maybe because he would have had to admit to making a mistake. Not exactly a human forte..." Lars suggested. "And... perhaps he thought that keeping you, in whatever way he could, was better than not having you at all. Even at the cost of his own self. He traded his soul, for a twisted illusion of what he used to have."
He fell silent, and she pondered his words. She hadn't been the same when Riga had brought her back from the dead. She had left something behind, that day when he had pulled her out of the darkness - a piece of her self. And so Riga's actions had turned both of them into nothing but hollowed shells of their former selves.
They sat there for a while and listened to the soft sound of the waves that rolled across the beach. It was a soothing sound. At some point, day had turned into night, and the fog had disappeared. Above them, the sky was clear and illuminated by millions of stars. He looked up at the sky and gazed at them, and she looked down at the sea, where their light reflected and danced.
"Lars, I just realized something," she said after a while.
"Hm?"
"We're still here."
"Yes. Where else would we be?"
She freed herself from his embrace and got up.
"No, I mean... we're here. Which means..."
She turned around, and saw the look of confusion on his face turn into realization.
"...we're not dead." he finished her sentence.
"So what's happening to the body right now?"
~ ~ ~
Amy Larsson's eyes snapped open, and she found herself staring into bottomless wells amidst an amber sea, overcast by dark clouds. Wide-eyed stare met wide-eyed stare. She felt his lips draw away from hers and his weight shift on top of her as he sat up.
A look of surprise washed over Riga's face, and it quickly turned into confusion. The augment in her left eye clicked quietly, and the black circles began to shift.
Her hand shot up from underneath him and grabbed the hand that he had just been about to move to the side of her face. She crushed her fist around his, until his bones cracked under the pressure. He opened his mouth to scream in pain, but was abruptly cut off when her other fist met his cheek bone with a sordid crunching noise. The rough edges at the knuckles of her glove left three deep gashes on his skin. A cry of pain escaped him after all, but was further interrupted as her armor-padded knee hit his groin and his voice got stuck in his throat.
It all happened in less than a second. She shot up from underneath him and flipped him over until she came to sit on top of him, straddling his body as he convulsed in pain. Now Riga stared up at her, and a look of wide-eyed surprise joined the look on his pain-contorted face.
"You disgusting piece of shit. I always knew a lifeless body wouldn't stop you," she growled.
He didn't say anything, he didn't even whimper in pain, as he stared up at her in disbelief at what had just happened.
"Precious one... what happened to you?" he asked her with a hoarse voice. Her right hand was at his throat.
"Where the fuck did you come from, all of a sudden? You weren't supposed to be here!" she hissed.
"Oh my love... you came back to me, didn't you?"
Tears welled up in his eyes, and he closed them. "You came back..."
Silence descended, only the sound of their breaths filled the air between them.
What am I supposed to do now? Null asked inside their mind.
She stared down at the man who had made her life hell for five years. And now his life was in her hand. It pulsed through his carotid artery right underneath her glove.
Suddenly, she felt very angry. But also very confused. They hadn't killed anyone since they had escaped from the Butcher's. She didn't want to kill him. But she also really did. It was confusing.
I... I think that's me... I'm sorry, Null, Lars whispered inside of her, and withdrew to a more distant part of their mind.
Her grip around his neck tightened, and Riga gasped. She loosened it again and clenched her teeth tightly instead, trying to focus.
It's okay... I just... I don't want to do something I might regret again, she said.
Then you won't be able to do anything at all, ever again, Lars said in a soft and low voice. That's not what life is about, though, is it?
Her hand twitched, and he winced.
Riga had never spoken to her like that. His voice had never been so kind and soft, as if each word was a caress. Riga had never given her a choice. But Lars gave her a choice. He drew back further, and her thoughts cleared.
That's not what life is about... she repeated his words and loosened her grip on his neck once more, but kept her hand there, just in case.
She drew her attention away from the AI in her head and focused it fully on the man beneath her. His face was pale as death, except for the dark shadows under his eyes and the spot where she had hit his face. There his hollow cheek was red and blood-stained. There was horror in his amber-colored eyes, but also awe. It was a strange look, and part of her wanted to beat it out of him. His hair was longer than when she had left, and it was disheveled, not the usual sleek look he had always worn. He looked bad. Exhausted. Sick.
"What happened to you?" he whispered.
"Curious, I just thought the same," she growled, scowling at him.
"Did you come back to kill me?" he asked her. "I thought... I suppose... I would understand, although I didn't expect..."
"Shut up," she snapped at him. She could feel anger well up inside, and this time, it wasn't Lars'.
Riga chuckled softly. The sound made her want to punch in his teeth. It made her sick. It was too much.
Null... Lars whispered inside her mind.
His voice was as strained as she felt, and he sounded very distant. He tried his best to stay in the back and let her make her own decision, but she wished he would just take it from her, this time.
I won't talk you into our out of this, but...
He showed her what he meant. It was his memory from just moments ago, when they had sat on the beach under the starlit sky.
You're not alone. Never forget that. I'm behind you. Always.
She closed her eyes for a moment and took a deep breath to calm her nerves and conflicting feelings.
"This is a shit show of unexpected magnitude," she mumbled.
"That look in your face... it's so much like her, but the way you talk... you really changed. Again," Riga said with an amused voice. "Will you kill me now?"
'Like her?' Null repeated and furrowed her brow.
Like the girl you used to be, Lars said.
But I'm not her any longer. And I'm not the same girl who escaped from here over a year ago.
I know, Null.
"I'm not gonna kill you," she decided. "It wouldn't change anything."
She didn't remove her hand from his throat though, as she cast a look around. They were still in his room. This was his bed, although the sheets were now in total disarray from their brief struggle earlier.
"Where did the guards go?" she asked.
"The- oh, I... I sent them away. When I realized it was you." he explained.
"You sent them away? And they just left you alone with an augment?" she asked in disbelief.
He shrugged slightly. "Money can be a convincing argument to look the other way... it's always been like that."
"Of course." She snorted with disgust. "Why did I even ask."
"They had knocked you unconscious when I walked in on them-," he continued his explanation.
She wondered what had happened before she had awoken, if he had done anything before that kiss. And at the same time, she wondered if she really wanted to know. His movement was still restricted by her hand. She could always crush his larynx if he said something that she didn't want to hear. She tightened her grip slightly to make him understand that as well.
"What are you doing here in the first place?"
"I was always here," he said. His voice sounded hoarse and feeble, and tears welled up in his eyes. He blinked them away,
"I never left... since you've been gone, I've slept in your bed every night, I waited for you to come back. And you did. You really did."
He never came after me, she realized. He never went to look for me, to hunt me down. He...
"Why did you come back, if it wasn't to kill me?" he croaked. "You almost killed those two guards when you escaped... I knew... I know you have it in you..."
His eyes seemed feverish now, as he looked down from her face along her upper body and back up again. She was endlessly glad that there were several layers of clothes, nano-patterend fabric and lightweight resin armor plates between his gaze and her skin. It made her angry, but it also made her feel a strange sense of sadness and dread. It was too much. She tightened her grip again.
I'm not gonna kill him, she tried to calmly reaffirm herself in their mind. I'm not gonna lose my self any further...
That's okay, Null, Lars said. We can just... leave.
She could feel his tension, it mingled with her own. This was as difficult for him as it was for her. The anger came and went in waves now, reaching out and receding back. In between, there was a turbulent flurry of other emotions, left behind by the waves like flotsam. It tumbled around in the shallow depths of their mind, until another wave came in and took it back, and there was only anger again.
Riga cleared his throat. "Is it because..."
The mission. The reason we came, she suddenly realized. He can tell us.
"I only came back because I need to know something," she said. "I need information-"
"I know... I saw the files that you looked at on my terminal... I didn't know you could hack... and break into places like this... or out of them... I don't really understand any of it, but..."
Riga's eyes became glassy as he talked, and his voice began to trail off. She tentatively loosened her grip around his neck. He laughed, and it sounded choked and hoarse.
"My luck is really atrocious. Before, you wouldn't hear any of it, and now you want to know? When you woke up, you didn't even recognize your own name. I tried to explain to you what had happened, but... you didn't listen, you just wouldn't... when you began to talk again, you said that you had no name, that you were nobody, and... just hearing your name, it upset you so greatly... So I erased all traces of who you were. Everybody thought you were dead anyway, so it wasn't that hard. I only had to hide the traces inside this house. It hurt... everything gone that we had. All of you... and me... but I kept that one folder. I guess I never gave up hope that eventually, the memory would come back, but..."
His words had left her paralyzed for a moment, and she just stared down at him, wide-eyed and confused. Even if it was the truth, even if she couldn't deny it any longer, she didn't want to hear it. It was too much.
"Stop it," she cut him off. "I don't... I don't care about any of that. I didn't back then, and I don't care now. That's not what I came for."
"Then what did you come for?" he whispered.
"A connection," she said, "I need a name-"
"Evelyn."
"What? No, that's not-"
"But I always called you Eve."
The name cut her like a knife, and it tugged on seams that she had carefully sewn shut a very long time ago. The name hurt. She didn't want to hear it. It was too much.
She slapped him across the face with the back of her hand, and he spat blood on the white bed sheets below.
"Shut up," she growled, clenching her teeth and her fist.
"S-sorry..." Riga said. The blood stained his face and his lips, but below it, he was as pale as the sheets. He coughed again, and his breathing seemed heavy.
"I think you lied to me, E- I mean..." his glassy eyes darted through the room, as if he couldn't focus them any longer. "I think you came here to kill me after all. I don't know how you did it, but..."
"What-?"
"It's okay. I understand why. But there's something I still have to tell you," he mumbled. "It will hurt. But I have to. Forgive me – no, don't. I suppose all things considered, that would be too much to ask."
"What the hell are you talking ab-"
And then the realization hit her. Slowly, she moved her hand away from his neck. He wouldn't be able to move any longer anyway. He was on death's door already. He had kissed her, and death had kissed him back. A fleeting Widow's Kiss, nothing but leftover traces of the poison she had put on her lips for so long. Even if she hadn't used it since her promise to Lars, she now realized that she had become poison herself.
"I... I didn't mean to- I didn't-," she stammered.
"I'm sorry, my precious one," Riga said, his voice nothing but a hoarse whisper now. "I have so many regrets... so much... I should have done differently, so much I should have- probably not done at all. But there is one thing I don't regret."
He looked up at her, and for a moment his amber-colored gaze was clear. Underneath the messy hair and the blood that began to clot on his face, she could see, just for a second, the man he had once been. The man in the pictures she tried so hard to forget again, the man from those illusionary memories she didn't want to believe to be true. She wanted to banish it all back into the darkness with the rest of the things that were too much for her to bear. And yet she couldn't pry her eyes away as his lips began to move, and he whispered almost inaudibly.
Her heart beating fast, she leaned forward and brought one ear close to his lips. His dying breath, hot and erratic, brushed against her skin as he whispered to her.
"I don't regret bringing you back, Eve."