hadriel_logs | you keep dreaming and i'm scheming

Oh. Rey.

Maketh's smile is warmer, suddenly. She tucks an errant strand of hair behind her ear and stands. The two of them, well. It's certainly different now. The dream was just that, a dream, but it could represent more. Potentially. They haven't discussed it yet.

In a different world, they're married. It was a false world and built on lies, but not all of it had been awful.

Some of it she even wants to keep.

"Of course. It's good to see you."

"It's... good to see you, too."

It's also hard not to feel that warmth from Maketh's response upon seeing her. Even harder not to give the same of what she's been given. Rey softens. She doesn't want to go into this hard cold.

After a second, she finds a seat and swings it up to Maketh's desk, dragging the leg of the chair by her own foot. Soon, she's sitting on the chair backwards, arms resting over the back of the seat. She gives Maketh a sincere look. "Do you trust me?"

Maketh blinks, surprised. It's a loaded question. Not one that she expected, either. She sits down carefully, watching Rey.

"Of course."

No matter how she phrases this, it isn't going to be easy. Her shoulders slack.

"I need to know what is going on between you and Hux."

Rey isn't blind. She notices things. More so than she cares to let on sometimes. Usually she's good about keeping her mouth shut, but between catching that man's conversation with the Null and seeing Maketh consorting with him even in places such as her own Speakeasy, Rey feels that she only has one shot at making this right. Before someone close to her gets hurt.

"We're working on a weapon." Maketh answers easily enough, though she's frowning. It's not a secret, exactly. "I don't have the skill to develop such a thing on my own."

Rey purses her lips, mouth tightening into a thin line.

"A weapon for what? And why him? Who is he to you now?"

If it hadn't been for everything she knows about Maketh's past, Rey wouldn't worry. Or, well, she would, but her concern would be elsewhere.

"Your masergun," Maketh says, frowning again. She doesn't understand why this is suddenly an issue. "General Hux is an asset to be utilized. Of course I don't trust him. He'll betray me when it's convenient. Currently it is not."

There's a moment of realization, when it dawns on her. Rey sighs, bringing a hand down her face and terribly regretting having shared that detail of her own world with Maketh, had she known that it would inspire her to make questionable arrangements with such a person.

"Currently he is working out a deal with the Null on murdering someone for them. You think he'd be the type to follow through with that?"

Rey already knows the answer, and yet part of her wants to be wrong -- that Maketh isn't somehow aware. But she knows better.

That's not surprising, Maketh doesn't say. Of course a few people would take the Null up on their offer. Hux, ever the opportunist, will play the field. "He'll attempt it. If he's clever, he'll likely succeed. But he knows better than to target my Guardsmen."

They have an understanding.

Those words strike a thorn in Rey's expression.

"You know that's not the point. If people find out that the head of the fucking Guard is getting chummy with a guy who openly jumps on the opportunity to play personal hitman for genocidal synthetics, you can kiss any good faith people might have in you goodbye. Everything that you and others have worked for--" She waves a hand at the room. "--this? Is gone."

"Don't be ridiculous!"

She expects this from Doctor Sweets, not from Rey. Not from someone who ought to understand the line that Maketh knows they all must walk in this business. If an objective must be taken, then it must be taken. Sometimes the means are distasteful, but that doesn't make them any less necessary.

Of all the people here, Rey ought to understand that.

"I am utilizing an asset in order to ensure the survival of everyone under my protection." Maketh tightens her mouth into a sharp line. "I cannot build the weapon without him. Either we collaborate or we lose a potential resource. It is not complicated, Rey."

Rey has done her fair share of butting heads with Lance in recent history, but this is one matter that she is sure they wouldn't have differing opinions on.

"It isn't that simple, either." She doesn't want to fight, but she can't be complicit and support this, either. Maketh has to know that. "If that asset turns around and decides to work with those synthetics, or use that weapon you are working on to help them, then your 'protection' is going to ring pretty hollow over the corpses of everyone in the city! And don't you dare give me any 'ends justify the means' bullshit, because you know that isn't what this is about."

While no fan of the gods, Rey can get on the same page about one thing: The Null can go fuck themselves.

It's hard not to stand up and get in Rey's face then, to raise her voice and prove her wrong. Maketh knows these arguments. She had them all the time with her officers on Lothal. In some ways, the familiarity is almost a comfort. Maketh lifts her chin, defiant. "The Null have made threats, just as the gods have. Their means remain unproven. Hux is not a fool. He will survive, and you do not survive with untested allies."

Maketh has proven her use, and so Hux has no reason to see her dead or weakened. Not yet.

"The Null don't need to make good on their threats -- they're fucking synthetics. They're machines that don't give a damn about us. I've fought their kind before. Been killed by their kind on more than one occasion." Of course, she has been killed by humans as well, but she at least had more in common with them than a soulless automaton. "I hate the shit that the gods do, but you can't think that what you're doing is for everyone's protection. This is about you and your vendetta, and I can't..."

She stops. Shoulders slack. Maketh will thank her for this someday, won't she?

"I can't let you go down that road."

"...what?"

Of all the ways Maketh thought this conversation might go, this was not among them. She feels cheated for a moment, absurdly. When she saw Rey come in and greet her, Maketh had thought--

Well, it certainly doesn't matter what she thought.

"You can't let me go down that road? Really? What does that even mean?"

"It means that I was under the impression that you had established the Guard all that time ago to help people, not so that you could fool yourself into thinking that it's worth sacrificing them for some 'greater good', or to form fucked up alliances with someone willing to hand them all over to an even worse enemy."

Rey's jaw grits. She wants to stay calm, but all of the things Maketh had told her in the past start to come together. And she gets it -- she does. She wants to believe that Maketh did everything with the best intentions.

That tends to be where it all goes wrong, right?

"This city is not your Empire. You are not an officer of your Imperial Court. Those are the assholes who killed you because you were trying to do what you felt was right. Are you going to stand there and tell me that they were right all along? Is that where you're going?"

"How dare you!"Maketh snaps, rising to her feet. Her fists are clenched, eyes wide and furious. No one knows how hard she has worked better than Rey, what she's given to make the Guard work. "Everything I have done is for the good of the Guard!"

Edited 2017-11-16 20:35 (UTC)

"How dare me?" Rey spits. She can't help but throw herself onto her feet as well. Keep eye level with Maketh. "How can you seriously think that working with someone like that is going to be good for you, let alone anyone here? And since when has it just been about the Guard? You're supposed to be helping people -- that was supposed to be the whole point! Unless I'm wrong and that changed somewhere down the road since you started conspiring with a fucking maniac."

In which case, Henry was right in that Hux had been a worse influence on Maketh than Rey thought. But that was a given either way.

Edited 2017-11-16 21:12 (UTC)

"He is an asset to be utilized!" Maketh snaps, rising to her full height. She refuses to be cowed by Rey, who could - if she wanted - pick Maketh up and bodily carry her out of the room. "Why did you tell me about the weapon if I was not to use it?!"

She could. Hell, Rey rendered the whole city in flames at one point, even if it were by no choice of her own. She still did, she still could. But destruction won't solve this.

"Because things have changed since then. We know more now than we did back then, such as what will happen if you succeed. You kill the gods, everything dies. We die." Rey grits her teeth, hands clammy. This is going about as well as she expected it would. And yet there is one fear that lingers on Rey's mind. "You die -- or worse."

Maketh becoming the very thing she was trying not to would destroy her.

"We don't know that!" Maketh snaps. There isn't enough information, nothing has been proven. Only the enemy is clear and now that she has the means to strike, she fully intends to do so. The opportunity will come. And when she's ready, she means to take it. "And I am not concerned with dying."

How foolish. She's died many times already.

A flash of red blinds Rey's vision. A familiar echo of something Nick had told her flares across her mind.

Rather than targeting Maketh herself, Rey grabs the desk that's between them. Regardless of its weight, it might as well be light as the paperwork that's on top of it, as Rey flings the desk into the adjascent wall. It flips, landing sideways. A leg snaps off.

"IT FUCKING CONCERNS ME, ALL RIGHT?" she bellows, not caring about making a ruckus when she's already made a mess. "It concerns me if you're hurt, and it concerns me when you talk like people here are yours to dispose to people like him!"

Her breath is ragged, skin is scalding hot. She sees fire in her mind.

"As for your 'asset'..." Venom practically ebbs from the word, like it's a cosmic joke in itself. "I'll destroy him if you continue this. I won't just kill him. I'll keep killing him. I'll fucking bury the bastard if I have to. Lobotomy was your idea once, wasn't it? I'll do that. I can. Because I would give my fucking soul to keep that man from poisoning yours."

Rey's anger is visceral and sharp. The desk goes flying. Papers scatter and wood splinters against the wall. Maketh holds her ground, back perfectly straight, eyes narrowed tight and full of fury. But she holds. She stands her ground and doesn't give an inch. Inside she feels suddenly, utterly calm. The eye of the storm. Nothing at all can touch her.

"You are acting like a child," Maketh says, voice purposefully soft. "Of all these people, I thought you would understand what we face."

Instead she's arguing against Maketh's brutal, Imperial logic. So what if it came from the Empire? Their teachings made her strong and they have need of that strength, now.

"The general is useful. More so alive than not." Maketh narrows her eyes in warning. "More so than you have been, of late."

No. Not this. Rey knows what Maketh is doing -- what she's trying to do. And while anger might be a pointless effort, Rey has to let it burn before she can attempt to simmer it.

"A child throws tantrums. A child makes empty threats," Rey growls. "I do not make promises that I can't keep."

Just ask Rose. Or anyone, really. Shit, Maketh probably doesn't even need to ask.

She takes a step forward, and it's like moving through molten lava. Nothing Rey can't handle. "I trusted you with the information on that gun when obviously I shouldn't have. If I'd known that it would lead you to think more like him, to accept the ways of the people who fucking murdered you, I would take it back." Her eyes narrow. "That's my mistake. I'm just correcting it."

If it means she has to spend every waking moment making sure that Hux doesn't take another step towards Maketh again, of getting involved with the maser weapon, Rey would gladly make that choice.

Maketh lifts her chin, defiant. Rey wants to make good on her threats? "You can certainly try. But if you think General Skywalker will stand for that, then you're far more foolish than I thought."

She puts venom in her tone.

"Go ahead. See what happens."

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject