Complicit

Posted on Mon Aug 8th, 2022 @ 2:38am by Subcommander Kaiae t'Lien

705 words; about a 4 minute read

Mission: Chapter VI: Racing the Storm
Location: Ourainavassa, Kaiae's Quarters
Timeline: After Midnight

With the arrival of the last ships, preparations had moved quickly the last few days, leaving Kaiae feeling as if she had even less time than she'd had before, and off balance with the new arrivals. Slowly, though, she'd begun to entertain the thought that perhaps it was not simply the newcomers that made her so.

In the low light of her quarters long after midnight, she carefully flipped the pages of an ancient tome; one she'd been gifted by her grandmother and knew well. This time, though...This time she gazed at the writings and illustrations within with an unsettled eye that became more, not less so, as she did so. Staring at the sketched likenesses of long-dead senators with her same ice blue eyes, ancestors she'd studied as a child. People her branch of the house had been so far removed from for hundreds of years, now.

She had no power; no action that associated her with the crimes of the Senate or the heads of great houses; and surely, with all that had transpired, not even inaction on it; proven with the charges leveled at her. A human, she was fairly certain, would look quizzically on the idea that had been haunting her, stuck on the practical points with which they would insist she was not complicit in such and was in fact quite the opposite. Humans were odd.

She had followed the dictates of the place she was meant for; impressed upon her since a young age that she was inherently destined for; the rights (few, at the distance she sat at; mostly a much freer hand to travel with or to petition the Senate itself) and obligations and responsibilities that went with such. And so she had: From her decades of service, to the association she had formed with Arreinye as a mentor and patron, the daughter of a highly ranked house guiding the daughter of a minor one. It had even been part of what had led her here; to treason and defiance, in which she had begun as a fulfillment of those oaths in the only ways she felt she could.

So. The shadows of it all were with her still, regardless of the actions taken or the lack of bringing about or influence upon the tragedies and atrocities at hand. She was bound to it all, and it to her; a part of it. Tainted on a cosmic level, beyond the simple niceties of the here and now; in ways she expected would have once again confused the humans. She shut the book, and walked over to the closet where she kept her uniforms and her gym clothes...And one final item, one that was different in its presence in her closet, from most aboard. A symbol of pride and honor, for 40 years; but now as Kaiae fingered the draped sleeve of her formal robes in house colors, she couldn't help but feel it was instead a symbol of the ways in which she was linked to all that was now irredeemably corrupted, forswearing themselves in their abandonment - no, worse - of the people of the Empire whom were meant to protect.

There was no coming back from that; no atonement that could suffice, for them. Not even the deaths they sought to avoid would cleanse them of it. As for herself...She had done what she could, to save whom she could. It was just this last piece...this tie to the rest that bound her; and she shoved the robe back in the closet, resolving that once they were on a place it was safe to light a fire (a planet, rather than a ship), she would burn it. For now, there was no time for such things; and though she had tossed and turned in the bed earlier before getting up to pace and read and ponder on it, now Kaiae forced herself to lay back down in her bunk and close her eyes; the first meeting tomorrow was in less than six hours, and somehow she needed to ensure she had at least a few hours of sleep before that.

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