Work Text:
The room was silent. Outside was a cacophony of alarms and explosions and shouting voices; in here the only sounds where the machine keeping him alive, his breathing, and hers. Strange, this silence, when there was so much that needed still to be said. Strange, but fitting: The first thing he’d ever said to her was “Shhhhh.”
She was a different person then, as literally as can be while still existing in the same body. He was a different person then too, living under a name he’d since rejected, serving a system that was destroying him from inside as surely as it was doing so to the galaxy itself. Together, they had fought, they had schemed, they had stolen, they had killed, they had lied every day of their lives. But they had lived those lives, against all odds. It was inevitable that their luck would run out, but that did not erase her gratitude for the time before.
And even now, he still might triumph. The intelligence his ISB source had provided was fragmentary, scattershot, borderline hysterical in its inferences, utterly terrifying in its implications. It could still be stopped, if she could pass his information along without getting captured herself. Luthen Rael could still help beat the bastards.
But she would have to kill him first.
Kleya was taking an awful risk, coming here. walking right into the maw of danger. The commitment of time and resources alone would never have met with Luthen’s approval. But he wasn’t there to give commands anymore, and the contents of his mind could not, must not — will not — be allowed to fall into their hands. Her profession and her politics were what had brought her here, not her personal commitments.
She stopped telling herself that the moment she entered the room and saw him lying there. They’d taken off his wig, of course, so he was the Luthen she really knew. That’s what made looking at him so painful: She could not write off the weakness written all over his waxen face as some sort of ruse. The Luthen she knew used to be alive, ferociously so, vital in a way that few men ever were. His aliveness devoured him from the within, uncontrollable and insatiable and inexorable as cancer. His fire burned had very brightly, but she saw now it was all but extinguished. It fell to her, now, to put it out for good.
Moving deliberately, she sealed the windows to protect them from prying eyes. There was every possibility they would burst in, and perhaps some officer in charge would have the forethought to have his men switch their blasters to stun before the brutes simply killed her outright. The moment that door opened, she’d know what to do. The weapon with which she’d killed the two guards still on the floor after she blew up the parking bay was ultimately meant for a single target: the woman carrying it.
If it came to it. Only if it came to it. She hadn’t the luxury of lurid fantasies of dying by his side, not if the Rebellion were to ever hear the information he was dying for to begin with. She would have to live if at all possible, even though the man who saved her life, who built her new one, who made her life possible wouldn’t be living it with her anymore. Not since she was a child, not since the day he found her, had she felt so alone.
She crossed to the bed where he floated, his lungs kept breathing and his heart kept beating and his brain kept firing by the lifeline extending down from the ceiling and pumping rhythmically into his chest. The first tear burst free of her eye to run down her face. How could a man so big become so small?
It had been long years since she’d had a family, but she thought she remembered how it felt, what it meant. It meant occasionally falling back on the others, letting them carry you until you were ready to stand again. She and Luthen could not afford to be family. He had never truly parented her, never cared for her like a child. By the same token, he had never let her parent him or cared for him like a child, either, though she knew he needed it more perhaps than she did. Hadn’t she reminded him to tuck his shirt in just a few hours earlier? But their work was too important for him to be anything more to her than a first among equals. She was his daughter when it was useful, and that was that.
Who could say how it looked from the outside? Their contacts saw her as the martinet who kept the machine running while Luthen schemed and dreamed, and that was fine. Their customers saw her as the well-mannered assistant who brought them what they wanted, the same way they liked to view everyone. That was fine too. She wondered what the Imperials thought. They’d be onto her by now, she doubted they had much to go on but they’d know Luthen worked with a younger woman. The would decide she was his daughter, she assumed. The imagination of even the sharpest Imperial mind was prosaic.
She looked down at the man who had been Luthen. He was not her father. He was more than that. He was her partner, her equal. There were times she’d resented him for that, times when his respect was a knife that cut deeper than condescension or contempt, times when it had almost made enemies of them. It was because he respected her that he expected her to do the impossible, to accept the intolerable, and do it regularly. In his heart of hearts, he did not believe she was capable of doing any less.
How could she ever say goodbye to such a man?
The answer followed immediately, a teacher and student’s call and response within her mind: You can’t.
She could not part from Luthen without finding some way, some tangible, palpable way, to take him with her. She never wanted to be parted from the man who made her world, and showed her how to change it. She didn’t want his fire to go out. She wanted it to burn inside her, too.
This is stupid, she thought as she moved down toward Luthen’s legs. As stupid as Meero must have been during the raid. To be so badly wounded…Even in the heart of their corruption, their control crumbles.
She shook her head. Dogma and doctrine would have to wait. What she had in mind was more intimate, and urgent.
She took her blaster back out and transferred it to her left hand. If trouble arrived, neither she nor Luthen would survive it this time. She would make sure of that.
Her right hand gripped the bottom of his gown and began to tug it upwards. His body offered no resistance as she hiked it up to his waist.
She reached under it now, beneath where the machinery arched over him like a bridge. Frustrated by her lack of room to maneuver, she paused briefly, looked at the control panel, and pressed a sequence of buttons. The section of the support bridge above his pelvis slid inward noiselessly.
Beneath it she saw a medical garment in lieu of underpants, connected to a series of tubes and wires emanating from the bridge. She quickly detached these; a hiss, an insistent but brief beep beep beep beep beep, then it was done. She slid the garment down. There, nestled in a tuft of dark hair, she found his cock.
She had never seen him this way. To her relief she found that she loved him still.
With a glance to the door, she reached down and grasped his penis. It wakened in her hand, she was relieved to discover right away. She thought, with honesty rather than pride, that she had always been good at this particular act. They had never pried into each other’s love lives, trusting each other to keep liaisons limited and discrete. But they were human. Wasn’t that what they were fighting for, in the end — the freedom to be human, not the metal-minded things masquerading as humans behind Imperial blacks and greys and whites?
Kleya slid the foreskin of Luthen’s stiffening cock up and down, fluidly but steadily. They had posed as lovers before, of course, just another temporarily useful role for Kleya to play for him. She’d been his wife, his mistress, his high-priced escort. But behind closed doors the masquerade ended. They had no more interest in romance than they did in family.
What she was doing now was different. He was the only person in the galaxy to share her burdens, and she his. Now, even in his final slumber, she had a means of awakening him, of connecting with the life force within him one last time.
There were elements of sex to it of course, and those pleased her, if she was being honest. Daughter, colleague, employee, partner — she’d been all of these things to him, and none. In this strange way she could be lover-and-not-lover too.
She would not have the usual way of knowing, she knew; he would not call out his impending climax. She had to be ready. Left hand still on her blaster, she brought her face closer to his cock. She saw then that it was beautiful, swollen to a twilight mauve, blue veins visible through the fine skin when she pulled back his sheath. It was fitting that she should see him like this in the end, that only she could connect this part of him with the rest of his damned, extraordinary life. She’d been the only one who saw the beauty in him there, too.
The withdrawal of his balls into a tight round orb at his base told her his time was near. With one last glance at the door, one last listen for the sound of approaching boots, she lowered her head to his hips. With great care, with reverence, she slipped the head of his cock into her mouth, and began to bob up and down in time with her hand. She knew nothing of what he liked, what made him feel good — you never will — but this would do, she thought.
A sudden jet of warm wetness across her tongue and onto the back of her throat told her she was right.
She milked him then with an intensity that surprised her, letting go with her hand and slamming her face down onto him hard enough to gag. She wanted it, she wanted all of it, every drop, and that was all she wanted of him. Not his pleasure, since he was past pleasure. Not his love, since she had it, in a way unique in all the galaxy. She wanted him, his stuff, his seed. She wanted him to put it in her body. She wanted her body to fold it within itself, to digest it, incorporate it. She wanted it to become a part of her. She wanted a part of her to be him. She wanted his fire to burn inside her forever.
She swallowed. Now it would.
When it was done she pulled her mouth off of him unceremoniously. Though she didn’t bother reattaching the wires and tubes she pulled his undergarment up and his gown down, then reextended the medical bridge. She didn’t want them to find him like that. That was only for her.
She did next what she had come there to do. She detached the device, link by metal link. She watched it separate from the bridge, heard his the sound that represented his vitals wind down, grow low, grow slow, grow still. The tears came again, flowing like the sweat from her brow. He would be gone any moment. They would be here any moment.
He was gone.
She leaned down then and kissed his head, the taste of his semen still in her mouth. Goodbye, Luthen, she thought. Goodbye, father. Goodbye, teacher. Goodbye, friend.
She had lingered as long as she could. She turned, and she left, and she never saw him again.