A Year in the Dark

[Veston]

The North Wind came in low over red rock, following the coast of one of Zoon's long snake-backs of land, and Veston watched the terrain scroll past the viewport and thought about the kind of person who'd end up here.

Not end up here by accident. End up here and stay.

Zoon pressed down on everything. He'd felt it the moment he crossed the atmosphere — a weight that settled into the shoulders and the knees and didn't negotiate, a constant reminder that the planet itself was measuring you. At a hundred times standard gravity, even landing the ship had been a conversation between the engines and the ground, and walking away from it had been a choice he'd had to make with his legs before his head finished agreeing. He'd had that fight every morning since.

The signal had been clean enough to tell him someone was alive, and too weak to tell him where. He'd spent the first day quartering the coastline on foot, moving inland where the rock flattened out enough to cover ground, watching the receiver and getting nothing useful back. The second day he'd gone south along a ridge of exposed stone that ran eight kilometers above the treeline, following a spike in the readings that turned out to be interference from mineral deposits in the rock face. He'd stood at the end of that ridge in the late afternoon with the red dust coming in off the sea and the receiver quiet, and he'd looked at the terrain spread out in front of him and made a new plan.

The third day he went slower. Stopped trying to cover distance and started reading the ground instead, looking for sheltered approaches, natural overhangs, the places someone with sense would go if they needed to disappear. Zoon wasn't a hostile planet, not exactly, but it pressed, and anything that wanted to stay alive here long-term needed something to press back against. He was looking for that kind of decision-making in the landscape. He found the cave system on the fourth afternoon, following a dry channel between two rock formations that angled away from the coast wind, and the receiver climbed as he went in.

She was at the back of the main chamber, near a fire that had been burning controlled and small for a long time.

Names came out. Enough basics to know who they were to each other — she was Saiyan-Human, from Earth, had been on Zoon close to a year. He was Human, had a ship, had come because the signal asked him to. That was enough for now. The rest was already waiting in the conversation they were moving toward.

He looked at her across the fire, at the fighting gi patched so many times it was more patches than gi, at the cloak in the same condition, at the tail wrapped close and held there, and the count ran fast.

Toughened. Months, almost a year, of this gravity, solo, with nothing. Still moving, still sharp. Not broken. Not even close.

He'd been crouched with his forearms on his knees since she finished saying her name, close enough that the firelight reached both of them, leaning forward the way he always leaned, toward whoever was talking, toward whatever came next.

"Corsetta." He said it once, the way he said every name the first time, like he was putting it somewhere he wouldn't lose it. "You've been here eleven months. Hundred times normal gravity, no ship, no backup, nothing but what you walked out of that facility carrying."

He let that settle for one breath.

"And you're still here. That means something."

The question that followed had been sitting in his chest since the North Wind's receiver first picked up the signal. He let it out straight, because she'd been through enough that soft sounded like condescension to his ears:

"Who did this to you, and are they still on this planet?"

 

[Corsetta]

She'd given up hope that her hail mary transmission had reached anyone's ship, or at least anyone who cared enough to act on a poorly encoded message. Well, "encoded" was a very generous label considering she had no experience with such a thing and either made it impossible to figure out or so elementary that anyone could. That hope had lasted roughly...two months? Four months? Time flowed strangely while she was alone and when every single day was a desperate struggle to survive.

Truth be told, she had completely forgotten about the transmission until Veston had explained why he was there and how he even found her. Were it not for his Ki signature being notably lower than hers, she would have started punching before she could even process that he was Human. Though, there had been a tense stand off at first -- "Who are you? What are you doing here?" -- which only relaxed her guard slightly when she thought his answers were genuine.

He seemed kind.

She had seen evil men wear kind masks.

Reluctantly, she welcomed him into her "home" and they sat beside the meager fire that's only purpose was to provide light. She had a long, flat rock that she sat upon, but hadn't planned for visitors. Veston had to crouch or sit on the ground. The room they were in was ovular in shape with a couple of tunnels branching from it: one that lead to the entrance not too far away, and another that lead deeper and would branch off into a network of dead ends.

Neatly lined against a nearby wall was a trio of spears. One wooden, one stone, and another carved from one of the native metals. They all looked worn and tired, especially the wooden one that was permanently stained with animal blood. The only other decoration was a collection of wires and broken parts from her space pod. Clearly, she had attempted some sort of science experiment with them at some point, but nothing easily identifiable came of the tinkering.

When they had started talking, she'd only given the absolute basics of her story: Born on Earth, been captured, found out she was part Saiyan, broke free, and now hiding.

She didn't tell him exactly how long she had been away from Earth, only that she had been in hiding for a year. She didn't tell him about the specifics of her escape. Didn't even tell him that she did have a ship, only that it was broken.

He didn't seem to pick up on her omissions, or didn't care. Instead, he...complimented her? Only then did he ask for more specifics:

"Who did this to you, and are they still on this planet?"

Her tail that had been resting on her lap twitched. Supposedly, Saiyans would wrap their tails tight like a belt, but she always found it more comfortable to let it hang loose.

She was silent for a moment or two, but Veston didn't press her. He just waited, patient for a woman who had clearly gone through far more than he had expected.

A breath filled her chest, then came out slowly.

"Changelings," she answered and the word tasted like vomit. "I was originally on Cold #01, where their main base of operations is."

Another pause. Her tail twitched again, restless.

"They took me here, to Zoon, 'bout four years ago."

She hadn't been enduring the weight of this planet for eleven months. It was years.

"Some of 'em are still here," she said while tilting her head to the side. She stared out, beyond the cave, and felt the eerily familiar presence of the dozen or so that remained. "Half-way across the planet, though."

Her dark, black eyes swung back to meet Veston's sky blue.

"That look of yours says you want to make them pay?" She said and then chuckled. She shook her head just once. "They're strong. Real fucking strong. Even if they weren't, it'd just piss off the ones back home anyway. That's half the reason I haven't been picking them off myself."

Another chuckle, warmer this time, came and left behind a smile that wasn't forced.

"I'm surprised you care enough about a stranger like me to even think about going after them. It's one thing to go on a rescue mission. Another to pick a fight on their behalf."

 

[Veston]

The count ran again, faster, and landed somewhere different than it had the first time.

Four years under a hundred times standard gravity. Not eleven months of hiding — four years of living in conditions that would have ended most people before the hiding even started, and then the escape, violent enough that she couldn't go home afterward, and then eleven months in this cave with spears she carved herself and a fire small enough that nobody outside would see it. The number settled into his chest and stayed there.

Not toughened. Forged. Four years of this gravity, solo, and she walked out fighting. That's not survival. That's someone who decided she wasn't going to stop.

He kept his face even, because she'd been through enough without adding a man looking at her with something she didn't ask for. His elbows stayed on his knees, weight forward, the hundred times standard pressing into everything the way it always did — into the floor, into his shoulders, into the back of his neck — and he let the fire do the talking for a moment, the small orange light catching the patches on her gi, the worn wood of the nearest spear, the coiled length of her tail.

She'd called the look right. She'd called what it meant wrong.

"It's not about them," he said, and his voice came out level, not quiet — the kind of level that meant he'd already decided something and was explaining it, not negotiating it. "I didn't come here for Changelings. I came because the signal asked me to, and you're the one who sent it, and that means you're the one I'm here for." He looked at her straight. "You want to leave them alone, we leave them alone. You want to deal with them, we deal with them. You make that call. Not me."

He gave her a moment with that, the fire popping once between them, the gravity pressing down on everything equally, on him and on her and on the cave itself.

"What I do care about is whether they come looking," he said. "You told me half a world away. I heard that. I also heard that you've been here eleven months knowing exactly where they are and not moving on them, and that's not fear." He leaned forward another inch, close enough that the firelight reached both of them fully. "So what's keeping you here?"

 

[Corsetta]

You're the one I'm here for.

It was such an obvious statement -- he was, quite literally, only here because of her distress signal. To help her. Yet, to hear it aloud was...

Was something she had never heard before. Years she had spent hoping that those words would be spoken to her as she was freed from her cage. Years praying that someone, anyone cared enough to find her. Even though everyone she was close to had been killed, surely someone noticed? Investigated? Was at the very least a little curious? Those were all foolish thoughts of a teen trapped in an impossible situations and thoughts that she had buried as reality had set in.

She didn't even realize that she wasn't looking him in the eye anymore. Her gaze was lost to the flicker of flames with a pout trying to pull down an otherwise flat expression. His words, strong but not harsh, continued -- he clearly didn't pity her, nor did he think her some child that needed to be treated delicately.

He talked to her as an equal. Not at her. Not the lamentations of prisoners who had resigned themselves to the cruelty of the world. Not the carefully controlled manipulations of her capturer. Just, another person that he cared for and respected.

It felt weird. Her tail slid from her lap and wrapped around her leg.

So what's keeping you here?

Why hadn't she gone back to finish what she started? Why not just steal a functioning pod and get off this horrid planet? Why did she just stay in this cave, resigned to being stranded for the rest of her life?

She knew the answer, she just didn't want to say it.

Her knee began to bounce to release the building anxiety.

"When I escaped, I..."

She dragged the word out as if to buy time for her brain to catch up.

"It was messy."

A log with the fire reached its limit and broke in half. Embers flung into the air and the flames momentarily reached a few inches higher before settling back into a modest glow.

"Wasn't some tactical fight, or me systematically killing those fucking Changelings, it was..."

Again, the words didn't come out. Her lips stayed parted, ready to finish the thought that was so clear in her mind, but nothing came. Instead, she just let out a heavy breath and furiously scratched at the back of her head.

"I lost control. Turned into some sort of monster," she forced the words out, equally sharp as they were embarrassing. "It's only 'cause of that I was able to make it out alive.

"I don't trust myself to go back and not lose myself to that rage again."

 

[Veston]

He let out a slow breath through his nose, leaned forward another inch, and looked at her with the full weight of his attention.

The embers from the broken log drifted up and faded. He watched them go, and the fire settled back to its modest glow, and the cave went quiet except for the low press of a planet that had been grinding on both of them since they sat down.

Lost control. Turned into something she's calling a monster. Fought her way through a Changeling facility in a state she couldn't direct, couldn't predict, couldn't pull back from. And she's been sitting in this cave for eleven months afraid that the same thing that saved her life is going to cost her it the next time.

She's been here alone with that. Nobody to put it down in front of.

He reached around the side of the fire, closed the distance between them, and put his hand on her knee. Big, warm, one firm press. Just present.

"Hey." His voice dropped, aimed closer, still the same voice that had been filling the cave since he walked in. "What you're describing isn't a monster. That's a Saiyan. Full blood or half, it doesn't matter. You hit a wall, your body broke through it, and you came out the other side alive." He held the eye contact and gave it a moment to land.

"That's not something that happened to you. That's something that lives in you. That's very different."

The orange light caught the dust that always hung in Zoon air at this gravity, threw it up the cave walls, and he felt the planet pressing down on both of them with the same indifference it had pressed on with her for years. He thought about what it meant that she was still sitting upright.

"You've been here eleven months, scared of yourself," he said, "because the last time you let go, you were alone in that facility, fighting alone, and there was nothing on the other side worth pulling yourself back for." His hand stayed on her knee, steady.

"All of that has changed, now. You've got a ship, you've got someone sitting across from you who isn't going anywhere, and if you decide you want to go deal with what's left of that place? I'll be right there with you. Sounds like something worth coming back for, to me. And that's what changes what that rage has to work with."

He meant every word of it, and the warmth and honesty in his voice came as naturally as it always did when one decided to be truly honest.

"So, tell me what it felt like," he said. "The part right before: when you knew you were getting out."

 

[Corsetta]

His hand came onto her knee and she fought against the reflex to jerk away. Once the feeling passed and all that remained was the warmth, the strength, of another person, something in her softened. The bouncing of her other knee slowed to a stop. Her shoulders, once so tense that they now ached, lowered. She lifted her eyes and met his gaze once more.

Though he hardly moved, he felt so much closer from just that touch alone.

Her face warmed. She looked away.

"Bold claims when you barely know me and I just confessed to going into a blind rampage," she said, but the chuckle that followed stripped away any confrontation that may have been implied. "Your friends are pretty lucky to have someone like you around."

She wondered if he would actually be saying the same things if he had been there that day. Saw an entire wing of the facility reduced to scrap metal. Bodies ripped apart, squished, some somehow still alive even after all of that. It wasn't the sort of sight that most would be able to handle, let alone she her as anything but a rapid beast.

"But, uh, what it felt like?" She circled back. Her lips pressed into a fine line, brows knit with concentration. "I don't remember much of what happened during it all, but right before?

"I was tryin' to sneak out and almost made it, but someone tripped the alarm. Found myself stuck at a locked door. I heard 'em coming, closing in on me, and I just..."

Beneath Veston's hand and the patchwork pants, her legs tensed again. She forced them to relax, but it only lasted a second before a new knot began to form.

"I knew they'd kill me, just like the others. I was too risky to keep around, no matter how much Fridgt--"

She cut herself off. She never intended to go that in depth. No one needed to know about those specifics.

"No matter how valuable I might've been, so...I knew I was gonna die and, I mean, wouldn't that piss you off, too? After enduring everything, after getting so close to freedom? To just get shot in a hallway and tossed into a garbage pile?"

 

[Veston]

He heard the cut-off: Fridgt. Decidedly a Changeling name. Corsetta pulled it back before it could go anywhere, and he let her pull it back, because she'd given him enough to know what it meant that she stopped there.

Veston had no right to pry open that vault, but he could knock on the door.

His hand stayed on her knee, steady, not pressing for anything. The fire had burned down another inch while she talked, throwing less light now, the shadows deeper against the cave walls, and the only sounds left were the two of them breathing and the occasional low crack of wood settling into ash.

Everything, even the dust and ash in the air, fell so fast under Zoon's immense pull.

"Yeah," he said. "It would."

After everything she'd described, after years of this gravity and the facility and whoever Fridgt was and the locked door and the alarm tripping with guards closing in? To die in a hallway. To get that close and not make it out the other side.

He knew exactly what kind of fury that was.

"You weren't a beast," he said. "You were a person who'd been pushed past every limit anyone had a right to push you past, and your body did what bodies do when the only option left is survive or don't. You survived." He held her gaze, voice warm and even.

"Be clear-eyed about what happened. Understand it. That's how it stops owning you."

He watched her face in the firelight, the concentration still pulling at her brows, the way she'd looked away when her face warmed and then found her way back.

"Fridgt," he said, easy, like he was just picking up a thread she'd left on the floor. Not a demand, not even a push: just the knock at the door.

"You don't have to go there if you don't want to. But if you do, I'm listening."

 

[Corsetta]

That's how it stops owning you.

He was right. It was the very sentiment that kept her alive -- recognize something for what it was and adapt it into a tool to be wielded. There was nothing else in her live that had paralyzed her like what had happened that day, and the past eleven months on Zoon had proved that. Obstacles were meant to be overcome.

So what kept her from overcoming this one?

Her chest felt lighter, like the weight even greater than Zoon's gravity had been lifted.

Suddenly, the hand on her knee felt even more present. Even more foreign. She didn't shake him away, not after allowing him to linger for so long, but her tail twitched.

Then he said it. The name she let slip. That was when she couldn't stop the tenson from squeezing every inch of her body. How her tail flicked even harder and the way her eyes widened and then dropped into a scowl that bordered on a glare. Not at him, not because he had picked up what she had dropped, but simply because that was the natural reaction she had to even hearing the name.

She shifted her weight on the stone she sat upon.

"The scientist overseeing the group I was in," she explained after a long pause. "He spent a lot of time yapping at me, tryin' to convince me that I'd be so much happier once they were done with..."

She realized she hadn't told Veston the specifics of what the Changelings were doing. Why she was even here on Zoon. Again, she shifted her weight. This time, she leaned back from him, onto her hands that rested on the back edge of her seat.

"...modifying me. Synthetic modifications to my body. That's why they brought us here all those years go. Supposedly, the process is rough on the body, so we needed to be strong enough to survive this for even a chance to make it through the conversion."

It was the first time she actually vocalized what she had been through -- there had never been a need to state the obvious to Keelan or Fridgt. Saying it all made something in her stomach churn and the taste of bile tickled the back of her tongue.

"Obviously, he was off his rocker for thinkin' anyone would be excited about it, but he made one hell of an attempt at changin' my mind."

...And got far too close at succeeding far too many times, but she would never admit it.

 

[Veston]

He let her have the distance. His hand came off her knee. He stayed where he was, weight forward, elbows on his knees, watching her talk.

Synthetic modifications. Conversion program. Years of 100g conditioning to harden the body for the process. Changelings running it. Fridgt running her.

And he spent a lot of time talking to her. Personally. Trying to convince her it was something she'd want.

What a fucking monster.

He kept his eyes on her face while she found the words, watching the way finishing the sentence sat with her, the slight change that moved through her expression when she got it all the way out. First time saying it to anyone. He gave her a moment with the fire between them, letting whatever saying it out loud had kicked loose settle before he opened his mouth.

"They took people," he said, "put them through years of this," he tilted his head toward the cave floor, toward the gravity pressing on everything, "and called it preparation. Like they were doing you a favor." He said it flat, no heat in it, the way he said things that didn't need heat because the wrongness was obvious and he wasn't performing his reaction for anyone.

"That's what Fridgt was selling you."

He held her gaze for a moment, steady.

"You said he made one hell of an attempt." His voice stayed easy, the same it had been all night: warm and level and not going anywhere. "I'm not going to ask what that looked like, but I want you to know that I...get it, in my own way."

He reached forward and put a fresh piece of wood on the fire, feeding it back up, the orange light climbing the walls again. Even the way light rose and spread seemed shorter, more crushed, more stunted than on Earth.

Veston even felt winded simply sitting there for this long now, and the very bones of his legs still ached from the journey to this place.

His mind reached out, that sixth sense he had trained to develop, sharpen, to extend across an entire world and even beyond if he needed it. It lit up with presences, some great and mighty, others minor. How many were Zoonian warriors, civilians, Changelings involved in this, and Changelings not? Power wouldn't be enough to identify them. Civilians would be weak, but Zoonian civilians were some of the most powerful simply because of the weight of everything here. Someone powerful wasn't necessarily involved in this, either.

"How many of them are still on this planet?" He asked. "I can sense all kinds of people across this planet, but I've got no idea how many might be against us, or after you."

Us. It was already "us", because of course it was. Anyone who could learn all this, find her here like this, learn about her, and not put himself in her corner?

That person was just as much a monster as Fridgt.

 

[Corsetta]

She couldn't imagine how Veston could possibly get it in his own way, but she didn't doubt him either. It was a question to be asked another day, when she wasn't feeling so exposed and grappling with old wounds being laid bare before a man she had no good reason to be sharing all of this with.

Even after she became us in his dialogue, she hesitated to pick up the thread he left behind like he had done for her. In that hesitation, the conversation shifted to something much easier to digest: the very real and physical threat of the Changelings still on the planet. Likely still hunting for her.

After the devastation she left behind, she doubted they weren't going to just let this slide.

She looked up at the ceiling of the cave, long shadows concealing all of the details of it. Beyond it, she looked with eyes that saw beyond the physical. Again, she felt the familiar souls of the planet they were on. All of them far enough away that any approaching should catch her off guard; she purposefully chose one of the most remote locations she could find.

"They come and go," she explained as she zeroed in on where the facility was. "Right now I can sense 'bout eleven of 'em out there. There haven't been any searches from them in a month or so, as far as I can tell."

A blink brought her attention back to the physical world. Dark eyes that caught the orange and red glow of the fire fell down and met Veston's gaze again. This time, steady.

"Couldn't tell you if they're working with the locals, though. Probably, they seem like the type that would, but I've been assuming everyone on this rock is against me."

Wind cut along the distant mouth of the cave and made an echoing whistle that they heard before they felt. A cool breeze snaked through their hair and tugged at the campfire.

"I've got a good sense of their patterns," she said. "But, most of 'em aren't that much weaker than you in terms of raw strength. Even if we got the jump on 'em, I can't promise I'll be able to protect you if things go sideways."

She paused.

"I also can't promise I won't lose control over myself again."

Their gazes held. She didn't shy away and neither did he.

"But they won't stop lookin' for me. Not after what I did and Fridgt's pride won't take this lyin' down. There will be a fight. It's just a matter of when."

Did he take the risk and strike now when Corsetta's knowledge was the most accurate? Did he urge caution and wait until they were both stronger and Corsetta more capable of wielding her power?

She didn't know which was the right answer -- or if there even was a right answer -- but whatever his answer was would tell her more about him than any of the words spoken thus far.