Prompt: Charmeine reacts to Kore’s death, in the early Olympus days

  For most, it might have seemed an odd sight, that of a hyper-advanced starship medical lab that was staffed almost entirely by ghosts. There were, in fact, only about a tenth of what would be the normal allotment of living medical crew members for a ship this size. But then, there were few starships, even amongst the incredibly vast Seosten empire, whose chief medical officer was also one of the most powerful Necromancers in existence. Or a Necromancer at all, really.

  At that particular point, all of the other living medical personnel (what few there were who had still been on duty) had been sent away, leaving only a half dozen or so partially-transparent ghosts bustling about through the medical lab, carrying on with the standard duties of keeping up with the injuries and illnesses that always managed to affect the crew of a ship this size.

  There was no chime as the door into the room swooshed open near-silently. It was as soft as a slightly heavy exhale. That itself was still enough to make Manakel, head doctor of the Olympus, turn away from a cabinet full of various medications he had been contemplating. For a moment, he’d thought one of the ghosts moving right behind him had just sighed, but upon seeing the open doorway, the man blinked. “Well, that’s odd, I’m quite certain I turned on the privacy req--”

  Something whistled past the side of his face to strike the monitors he had just been looking at. The man’s gaze snapped around that way before he’d consciously realized what he was doing, and he was already cursing himself midway through the process. But the reaction happened too quickly for him to stop himself, despite knowing what a mistake it was almost immediately. He did his best to jerk back the way he had just been facing, to the open door. At the same time, his power reached out to fill the ghosts around him with more Necromantic energy, preparing them.

  It wasn’t enough, neither his reaction time, nor the extra power he gave his assistants. Just as he finished turning his head back that way, a figure slammed into him with enough force to make Manakel stumble a couple steps, his back hitting the monitors while a soft grunt escaped him. Even with his Olympian strength, boosted as it always was by Necromantic power, the impact still staggered him.

  “Dismiss them.” The voice that hissed those words right in his ear was exceedingly familiar, though recognizing it didn’t exactly make the tension that had leapt into Manakel the second he had noticed the threat of the open doorway disappear. Especially once he noticed the feel of a knife blade barely touching his throat. A blade that drew a very faint line of blood as his aggressor added, in a voice that was cold, and sharper than the weapon itself, “Dismiss them now, or we can see if you’re a good enough Necromancer to start puppeting yourself around.”

  “Charmeine,” he managed, speaking very carefully to avoid letting his throat be pierced even more by that blade, “here I thought the two of us had been getting along swimmingly recently.” He knew why she was here, of course. It wasn’t a difficult deduction to make. He even sympathized. Still, he wasn’t the biggest fan of being attacked in his own lab and threatened like that, whatever the reasoning.

  Though maybe, just maybe, there was a part of him deep down that was angry enough with himself that he almost wanted to see if she would follow through with the threat. He might deserve that.

  For Charmeine’s part, her other hand found his wrist, twisting it just a little while her eyes glared into his. “Oh, we have been. That’s why I’m giving you the chance to dismiss the ghosts yourself so the two of us can have a little private chat, instead of just killing you and being done with it.”

  She let those words penetrate, giving the man a chance to hear just how serious she was, before continuing. “You might think I'm an idiot, but I know what you've been doing. You really believe I'd just accept your word that you did everything you could for her? I did my own little investigation, you worthless fuck. I know you’ve been writing a paper about this. I know you think you're going to get a nice big boost to your career with that. It's all just a game to you, isn't it? When was the last time someone actually identified something that could kill us that efficiently? You think you can use that to make an even bigger name for yourself. You think you can use that parasite against the Fomorians. You sacrificed her for that. You just let her die!”

  With that shouted accusation rattling off the walls, Charmeine glowered at the man, their faces inches away. Her next words were softer, and colder. “So give me one reason not to kill you.”

  Somehow, Manakel knew testing the assassin on that wouldn’t end well. Not in her current state of mind. And despite his feelings of guilt, he didn’t truly want to die right now. With a thought, he dismissed the ghosts. Well, mostly. They all disappeared, but one was actually sent to another deck, ready to summon aid from Puriel should this situation deteriorate any further than it had.

  “I would be more than happy to speak with you, Charmeine,” he informed her once that was done, giving the woman what she wanted in hope that she would ease up a little. His voice was soft, and he made every effort not to move or do anything she might see as a threat. Manakel truly didn’t want to see things get worse, and it seemed to be teetering right on the verge of that. “But it might be somewhat easier on both of us if we did that while sitting down.” There was a part of him that wanted to tell her that he wouldn’t become any closer to being immortal if he happened to be perched on a comfortable chair. But this wasn’t the right time for that, at all.

  Even as he had that thought, Manakel had to ask himself once more if he was trying to make her carry out the threat. If he convinced her to kill him, would that actually ease the pain he felt right now? Otherwise, why would he be so tempted to say something so callous at this moment?

  While he asked himself that very important question, without getting a satisfactory answer, the woman with the knife at his throat used the time to consider what he’d actually said out loud. He could almost feel her trembling with rage and despair. In the end, she finally grimaced with annoyance and gave him a little shove sideways, away from the monitor. “Fine, sure. Go ahead and get comfortable. You may as well, since it could be the last time you feel anything at all.”

  In most cases, making that sort of threat to a superior officer would have completely ended the offender's career immediately, at the very least. More likely, they would have been locked up for some time. But the Olympus wasn't like most ships, and this wasn't a usual situation. Manakel only paused briefly before inclining his head in agreement while moving to sit in a nearby chair. He gestured for the woman to take the one next to him. “Now then, would you like to talk?”

  “Talk?” Charmeine echoed in disbelief while walking that way. But rather than take the offered seat, she lashed out to kick it. It was simply hovering a foot off the floor, so the chair went sailing backwards, rebounding off the edge of an exam table before going sideways to hit a wall. “You wanna know if I’d like to talk? What I’d like to do is cut you open and find the part inside you that made you fuck up so badly you let one of our own people suffer and die like Kore. Was it just an experiment? Did you want to see what would happen? Did you want to test that little parasite and find out if it could be converted to a weapon against the Fomorians? You fucking tell me, you son of a bitch, was she a sacrifice!?”

  Manakel was silent for several long seconds, letting that question wash over him. He absorbed it and rolled the question around in his mind, hearing the words pounding in his head over and over before offering a very faint, utterly humorless smile. In the next second, Charmeine had just enough time to sense something behind her, before a ghost appeared there and gave her a hard shove. It sent her stumbling forward two quick steps. And Manakel was already there, having risen from his seated position so he could strip the knife from her hand before catching her neck.

  He propelled the woman across the room like that, with one hand on her arm and the other on the back of her neck. Charmeine felt his strength abruptly and very dramatically increase, as he simultaneously used his standard Seosten boost, while also taking on even more by draining a quick series of ghosts he summoned for that very purpose. Her own boost wasn’t enough to escape. It was barely enough for her to keep track of what was happening, given the speed of it.

  In a couple of seconds they had crossed the entire room, reaching the office where Manakel did all his private work. As they made it inside, the man was already snapping, “Computer, load the holos for every case file, medical study, experiment, and absolutely everything else I combed through in the course of attempting to treat Kore. Override lock on displaying too many simultaneous files, authorization Manakel Zeta Kai Prime, voice print chief medical officer.”

  That was what he was saying, but Charmeine wasn't hearing his actual words. The only thing she could hear was the rush of blinding anger that completely overwhelmed her every thought. From the moment she had entered the room and saw the man she blamed for Kore’s death, she had already been near the point of losing what very little ability to be rational that she’d had left. And now that he was physically dragging her through the room, spouting words at his damn computer that she didn’t care about, that incredibly tenuous grasp was disintegrating into nothing far more rapidly.

  He was talking. He was saying something to the computer, holding her in place, using his ghosts to empower himself. He was going to get away with this. Kore. Kore was gone, and he was going to get away with it. Kore’s death would mean nothing. She was gone forever and… and…

  And that was enough. Manakel’s power may have allowed him to rapidly summon ghosts and absorb their energy to boost himself. But Charmeine’s gift didn’t rely on such tricks. Her Tartarus power was both far simpler, and yet infinitely more complicated. The more she hated the person she was fighting against, or the more she loved the person she was fighting for, the stronger and faster she was.

  In that moment, there was no living person Charmeine hated more than Manakel. And there was no one, not a single person, she cared about more than she did Kore. But Kore was dead now. She was gone, and the only way to avenge her, the only way to make that matter, was by dealing with the man who was responsible for her death. Never, in these past few years since her power had awakened after leaving Tartarus, had Charmeine felt its twin aspects so strongly.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  His own boosted strength meant nothing then. With an enraged bellow that echoed off the office walls, she ripped her way free of his grasp and twisted around. Her right foot kicked his legs out from under him. Before he could fall, she caught the man by his uniform shirt and used that to lift him up and bodily hurl him across the room to slam into his own office wall. An instant later, she was on him, hand closing around his throat. No more talking. Kore was dead, and now the man responsible for that would die too. Charmeine couldn’t bring back her friend, her… her lover. She couldn’t bring back the woman she cared about more than anyone else on this fucking ship. But she could, at the very least, make sure Manakel paid for it once and for all. She could just erase him forever.

  The knife he had knocked out of her hand was still laying on the floor in the other room. But that didn't matter. It wasn't as though Charmeine’s supply of blades was that limited. A new one appeared in her grasp with a particular twist of her fingers to summon it, and she had it right up against the side of his throat in another millisecond. He was on his knees, back against the wall, with one of her hands gripping his neck from one side to turn his throat toward the blade in her other hand. “You think I’m gonna sit here and let you show me just how much data you got by sacrificing her?” she hissed, already starting to push the knife into his throat to be done with him.

  That was when a voice spoke. A familiar one, weak as it may have sounded. “I still want you to.”

  Kore. It was Kore’s voice. That was the only thing, in that very moment, that could have gotten through to Charmeine and stopped her from finishing the motion of that knife. She froze, before her head slowly turned. She kept the knife right up against the man’s throat, ready to kill him the second he so much as twitched. But he didn’t twitch. He stayed still while she looked over there.

  One of the files he had told the computer to open with a small hologram that showed Kore, visibly weak and clearly toward the end of her final days, laying in her bed with Manakel standing over her. She continued after taking several deep, shaky breaths. “When I… when I am gone, you take my body apart. You cut me up, you take every piece of me and use that to make sure this never happens to anyone else. You study what this thing did, and you find a way to save others. You understand me, Doctor? You use it to save other people. Don’t let them suffer.”

  The Manakel in the holo shook his head and insisted, in a voice that cracked slightly. “Hush, you. Let's not talk about any of that now. I can still save you. This isn't the end of your life, Kore. You’re young. Too young to start babbling about dying, and how your body should be treated afterward. You haven’t seen nearly enough of this universe, and I've seen our people come back from far worse than this. We’re a resilient bunch.”

  There was a very weak chuckle from the woman on the bed. “We are,” she confirmed. “And I feel like most of us are far better liars than you’re being right now.” She dropped her gaze, looking off into the distance in silence. Which just happened to make it seem as though she was staring right at Charmeine, while the other woman watched the holo and trembled a little bit.

  Finally, Kore spoke again. If anything, her voice was even weaker than before. “We both know I'm not coming back from this. I don't need false promises or help right now, Doctor. What I need is a promise you can actually keep. I need you to tell me that you will do everything you can to make sure no one else goes through this. Including cutting my body up into tiny pieces until you understand this parasite better than you understand your own name. Use me, Doctor. When I’m gone, promise that you will fucking use me to save others. I need you to tell me that, right now.”

  The implication behind her needing to hear those words right in that moment wasn’t lost on either the Manakel of that moment, or the Charmeine who stood in the present. Both felt their breaths catch. It was that Manakel, of the past, who spoke next. His voice cracked in the process, heavy with emotion. “Whatever it takes, my dear, I will make sure your death is not in vain. I will find a way to stop this thing, and those like it, from harming any more of our people.”

  “Any people.” Kore’s voice was as firm as it had sounded at any point in the holo. “Not just ours. Manakel, we’re not the only ones who matter here. This thing, this parasite, I don’t want it to hurt anyone else. You have to stop it. Not only for our people, for all of them. Promise me, please.”

  There was no response from Manakel for a few long seconds, as the man in the holo grimaced and looked away. Even here, through the miniaturized hologram view, the anguish on his face was readily apparent. He took a breath, then another, before speaking very carefully. “Yes. I will stop this thing from killing anyone else, Kore. You have my word. Whatever it takes, whatever I have to do to find the answers I need to stop this parasite, I will do it. Even if that means actually desecrating your… you to find those answers. I’ll take the parasite apart at the microscopic level. I will find out all of its weaknesses, and how to kill it before it can do this to anyone else.”

  Kore’s eyes closed as she slumped back in the bed, losing even more of what very little vitality she’d had. Her breath was a soft wheeze. “Don’t get me wrong, Doctor. I don’t want to die. I’d really rather not, given the choice. But I don’t have one. And if I’m going out, I want it to matter. You make it matter, understand? You make this death matter. I need… I just need to matter. Please.”

  The strain in that Manakel’s voice made his next words almost indecipherable. “You do. You will. You matter, Kore. You will always matter. I swear to you, by all that I am, you will always matter.”

  The hologram ended, and silence returned to the room for a long moment before Manakel spoke again. “You're right, I have been working on a report. I have been doing everything possible to document what happened to her. Because I promised her I would make that death matter. I swore to that woman that I wouldn’t let her die in vain. I couldn’t… I could not save her. I failed. You’re right about that too. But I tried. Look.” He rose, since Charmeine had released him by that point, his hand gesturing to all the floating holographic files surrounding them. “Go ahead and look at everything. Read it, watch it. I did what I could for her. I swear to you, Charmeine, I did everything I could. I tried. I failed. I’m sorry for that. But I still won’t stop working on that report. I won’t call off the dissection. I-- I won’t stop, because I can’t. I promised her. I promised her.”

  Charmeine had stopped really listening to him by that point. She turned away from the man, walking over to the frozen hologram. For several seconds, the Seosten assassin stood there in silence before dropping the knife she had summoned. Her hand extended to brush a couple fingers through that image of Kore. It flickered before returning, and she made a quiet, anguished noise from the very pit of her soul. The terrible noise repeated, even worse then, as her entire body slumped with the weight of what she was feeling in that moment. Her arms crossed over her stomach, like she was trying to hold in the pain of that loss.

  It took almost a full minute for her to actually speak again. Her raw, empty voice, devoid of the shield of anger that had protected her so far, finally broke the silence. “I wanted it to be you. I wanted it to be your fault. I wanted you to have done it on purpose. I saw what I wanted to see. Because if it was your fault, if you did it intentionally, then I could kill you, and make it better. If this was all because of you, then I could end you. I could kill the one responsible for this. Not a parasite, not a disease, not an untouchable mystery that's so far over my head. I could kill you.”

  “I truly wish feeling better about this could be that simple,” Manakel assured her. He gave a very soft sigh, leaning back against the wall while his eyes passed over the floating holograms, all of them a reminder of his failure. “Kore did not deserve to die. I would never sacrifice one of our own people for my own gain, not even for the Fomorian war. I would find another way. If… if there had been anything I could do to save her, I would have done it. I am truly sorry for your loss.” He was quiet for another second or so, before adding, “I am sorry for all of our loss. She should have lived.”

  “Should have lived,” Charmeine echoed in a flat, somewhat brittle voice. “Yes, she should have. A lot of things should have happened. A lot of people should be alive, and a lot of others should be dead. Too bad the universe isn’t fair. Too bad it doesn’t care about ‘should haves’ or ‘should bes.’ It doesn’t care at all. She’s gone. She’s gone and she’s never coming back. You--” Her eyes shifted as she turned to look at him. “You don’t have her ghost. I know you said you didn’t before, but I need to know the truth. I need to know. You can’t… you can’t let me talk to her.” That brittle voice all-but broke with those words. “You can’t give me a chance to tell her I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t have her ghost,” Manakel confirmed quietly. “I did try, but she was already… she moved on. She didn’t leave one behind. I…” He trailed off, taking a moment to choose his next words very carefully. “I can’t give you a chance to tell her. But she knew. I promise you, Charmeine, she knew how you felt. She… always knew how you felt. You didn’t have to say it.” This was about something far more important and meaningful than just a very unneeded apology. “She knew.”

  Charmeine gave a soft sigh of agreement, eyes closing as she pushed away the holographic file she had been idly looking at without actually reading. “She always knew. She was the one I…” Whatever the end of that sentence might’ve been, the woman never finished it. Not out loud, anyway. She just trailed off, before turning to walk out of the office, breathing heavily. “You can report me if you want. Have me locked up if that’s what you need to do. I don’t really care.”

  “That’s not what you need,” Manakel noted, already turning to follow her back into the main medical lab. “I wish I knew exactly what that was, but I know it’s not that. I am, however, going to remove you from active duty for a couple weeks. I’ll say you need time to process. But you aren’t going on missions until I think you’re ready.”

  Stooping to pick up the knife that was knocked out of her hand before, Charmeine tucked it away. Her voice, as she replied, was devoid of any actual care or emotion. “If that’s what you see as an appropriate punishment for assaulting a superior officer, so be it. I deserve worse.”

  The man’s head shook. “It’s not a punishment. It’s not even an acknowledgment of that. If I acknowledged that, in any official capacity, I… I wouldn’t be able to contain the effect. You wouldn’t come back from that. It’s not about punishment, it’s about what you need right now. But this… this right here never happened. You understand? It never happened. Do not put it in a report, do not tell the captain, your superior officer, or your drinking buddies about it. Do not say a word about it. You came for advice. You told me you can’t sleep. I prescribed rest. You will come back to see me in two weeks, and then we’ll see if you’re ready to return to duty. And when you--”

  He was interrupted by an alarm, an insistent buzzing sound that cut the man off and made his eyes snap over to a monitor on the wall. What he saw there made him curse sharply.

  “What?” Charmeine forgot everything else, body tensing once more. “What happened?”

  Manakel was already striding to a sealed vault-like door on the far side of the lab. “I put Kore’s body in stasis until I could bring myself… until I was ready to start the dissection. Something’s in there with her.”

  That made Charmeine whirl around, starting to move that way while producing both knives. “So sound the alarm, get everyone down here, get a fucking squad ready t--”

  It was her turn to be cut off, as the vault doors, which should have held against anything, abruptly dented outward, as something hit them from within. That loud bang was echoed by another, then a third. As both Manakel and Charmeine stopped short, the heavy vault door was pounded hard enough to rattle the walls, and set off more alarms. Then there was a horrible, earsplitting grinding sound as the door was shoved out of the way and forced back along its track. Only then, as the broken door left a wide enough crack to let them see into the other room, did the two get a look at just what was responsible for that.

  “Hello! My name is Persephone."

  Joke Tags: Go Back? I Think We Just Glided Right On Past Charmeine’s Power Making Her Stronger Than Manakel’s!?