Chapter Twenty One

If Bravery was a Melody

“Hey, baby! How’s it going?” That was what Jenna said to Sardius when she finally got to speak to him over the communicator, but it felt off, strange, and slightly twisted. She didn’t know what she had to say to him or what he could have to say to her. She supposed it was just to ease her mind to know that he was awake before he was taken aboard Don Leo’s ship… but that thought was hollow in its practicality.

When Sardius finally spoke, his voice sounded groggy on the other end of the line. “Oh, you know… I’m fantastic.”

“How are the surgical incisions?” Jenna asked.

“Oh, they’re nothing. Brazel is a good doctor. She could shove a sea monster through a hole the size of a pencil’s eraser.”

“You have pencils in space?” Jenna said, happy there was something so lighthearted to talk about.

“We love pencils. Graphite forever, especially for deep space travel.”

“So the cuts are small,” Jenna pressed. “How many of them are there?”

His voice was dry. “Uh, I can’t remember and I can’t see any of them. She covered my wounds with that stuff that makes them invisible.”

Jenna couldn’t see him, but she could picture exactly how he would have to be sitting in order to sound like that. In the pod, he would have reclined his chair just enough so that his head would loll back. He didn’t like to lie on his side as that might give him fabric creases across his cheek or forehead. Obviously, waking up to suddenly fight off an invasion with fabric creases pressed into your face was uncool when you were a pirate and a revolutionary. Instead, he’d lie on his back and let his head fall to the side just a little bit. It was the way he stretched out to expose his Adam’s apple. His eyes would be closed and he’d be talking to her with the dry mouth of a man who had fallen asleep with his mouth open on accident. He had probably been too drugged to close it.

“Are the drugs wearing off?” she prompted.

“Yep. I’m coming around. Brazel left me with a small pharmacy.”

“Did she?”

“Yeah. They’re not the typical thing you’d leave a recovering patient. Just to be clear, I didn’t ask for them. She gave them to me as a mercy thing to ease her conscience.”

“Are you going to take them?”

“If I don’t perk up, I might try one or two. They might be the difference between life and death. As in, taking them might ruin my chances of winning. But not taking them might leave me in too much of a stupor to win anyway.”

“Why did you have to have surgery five minutes before you did this crazy thing?” Jenna rasped, fighting to keep the tears out of her head.

“Oh, the surgery is going to help me win in a big way. Even if I lose, I’ll win. I wouldn’t have it any other way. You should always have backup plans for your backup plans.”

“And you’re not going to tell me what she did to you?”

He huffed out his breath. “There isn't much point. I’ll save the gory details until I can share all the gory details.” Jenna could practically see Sardius’ wink.

She hesitated.

“I have an hour to wake up,” Sardius reminded her. “There’s plenty of time for us to say everything we have to say to each other.”

“Like what?” she bit, working hard to keep her emotions from boiling over. “How I’m ripped asunder that you’re doing this? How I deeply regret it and how I have really come around to a place of tranquility on the idea of allowing Iker to die in your place?”

He chuckled. “If I don’t show up, Don Leo will just find another way to come at me. Next time, he might take you, which is unacceptable. He’s much more of a problem than an AAMC guy. This still might not go well for Iker. If we’re talking about the things I feel good about, I still feel quite good about going in to have it out with Don Leo. The toad has been pissing in my direction for years. He was going to come back to bite me for everything I’ve done to him sooner or later. I’d rather settle the score now, and now is a great time to do it. My faction is in power. Anything I do to him will not be considered a crime, but a public service. I’d feel like a spy or a secret agent if I wasn’t still so groggy from the anesthetic. Come on, Jenna. Don’t you trust me?”

Jenna looked up thoughtfully. There were fish swimming in a tank in front of her. Yellow neon fish darted between swaying plants, but Jenna had to work hard to see them. Calm was impossible for her. “I’m feeling a bit groggy myself. What am I supposed to trust here?”

“That I’ve been lying to you this whole time,” he said simply.

“How have you been lying to me?”

“By acting like a gentleman instead of the rebel butcher I am on the inside. I’m not just a common thief, though I have done plenty of that. To prove my point, I’m wearing a pair of your socks and one of your leather wrist cuffs.”

Jenna did a double take. “I don’t have any leather cuffs in my wardrobe.”

She heard him scoff in her ear and it was incredibly nostalgic. “I took it from the stuff from your old apartment back on Earth.”

“Oh?”

“It’s more authentically you that way,” he replied simply.

She couldn’t stop smiling. In that desperate moment, she couldn’t stop smiling. “Please tell me you’re wearing your own underwear,” she begged.

“Yeah, I’d tell you that… if I were wearing underwear,” he replied with a chuckle.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

At this point, she started to hear other sounds mixed into their conversation. The sound of a water bottle opening. The sound of Velcro tearing apart. The sound of a ziplock coming open.

“By ripping off my stuff, you sound like a pickpocket and not like a daring thief who robs the biggest badasses in the universe.”

“Huh,” he said before he took a sip of water. “I’ll have to work on how I present myself to you.”

Jenna groaned.

He groaned to mimic her groan. “I know what you’re thinking. I shouldn’t wear a lady’s leather cuff. It’s made of soft tan leather and it has flowers embossed in it, but you should know, I want things to be unusual and I love it when people gossip about me. Did you know that, Jenna?”

“Figures. That must be why you don’t wear clothes unless you’re forced to.”

“I have to tell you, I enjoyed the time I spent with you so much. I liked the odd looks I got from your visitors. How Vash tried so hard not to be suspicious because that’s the worst thing a butler can be. I loved people thinking I was your plaything and other people thinking you were my plaything like they couldn’t stop wondering which one of us was in control. Slipping on little bits of your clothes confused them. I was wearing this cuff before I knew I was going to be shot into space. Normally I think clothes are clothes, but after you’ve worn something close to your skin, Jenna, it suddenly has a kind of appeal that I don’t understand. I want you all over me… and I could only get that tiny bit of you. A wrist cuff,” his voice sounded as smooth as water spilling over marble, warm and caressing, covering all the empty bits of her with the idea of him.

Jenna couldn’t talk, her insides making her outsides hot.

“I have this crazy idea that you’ll like me more if I’m like you,” he continued in deep mellow tones. “If I cut out the bad parts of myself and replaced them with the good parts of you, I’d be perfect.”

Jenna sucked in her breath. “Don’t say this to me. If this is what you’ve planned as the last words you and I exchange, I don’t want to hear it.”

“Jenna,” he said quietly. “Of course, they’re not the last words I’m going to say to you. I’m going to kill everyone. I always kill everyone. What I’m doing now is repenting for keeping you at bay and being your perfect little bodyguard. You could send Iker to die? Well, I wish I’d ravished you in the dark every night I was there. What the hell was I thinking working with Conrad on a leak I couldn’t plug?”

“So you love me?” she whispered.

His throaty chuckle was a miracle coming down the line. “I love you.”

Jenna covered her mouth as the tears sprinkled on her lap. He said it. He finally said it.

“I don’t love anything else in the universe except you and I will never love anything again,” he said with a grit in his voice that was unfamiliar to her. “Except, I’m afraid, Jenna. Desperately afraid. You see, I haven’t been honest with you. I’ve tried to be, but I haven’t been. The me that you met over the earpiece. Yeah, that was me, but with so many parts of me hidden, you really couldn’t see anything about me. You couldn’t see me. And when I was playing Ryatt, I tried to warn you. I tried to pretend that I was him and the things I told you about myself were as Ryatt saw them. Ever since you found out that I am Sardius, I’ve tried to keep you as far away from me as possible. I can’t risk you meeting the real me and not loving me as much as you do now. The idea fills me with a kind of fear I’ve never known.”

“You can’t talk like this!” Jenna heaved the words like stones. “You have to be invincible when they open the pod doors.”

“Then swear to me that you will love me forever,” he whispered.

“Will you swear the same?”

“I swear,” he began. “I swear that I will love only you for the rest of my life.”

Jenna bit her lips together. She wanted to say the same thing back to him. She needed to say the same thing back to him. “I swear I will–”

“Quiet darling, I can see Don Leo’s ship. He’s just attached an anchor to my pod. I’m going to be docked next to him in ten minutes. Maybe less. Hey, I was wondering if you’d do something for me.”

“What?” she muttered as she chewed her bottom lip. “Don’t you want the rest of my vow?”

“Not now. I need something to work toward and you’re a diplomat who’s supposed to take multiple husbands. I was wondering if you’d play some of your loudest music for me. Not at first. At first, I’ll have to negotiate the release of Iker, but once his pod has been reshot back to the space station and things get hairy, I’d really appreciate something with a beat.”

“Any requests?” she asked, flipping through her playlist.

“Whatever you were playing when you dug up the crowns. I remember you being empowered by that music.”

Jenna wrinkled her nose. What was he talking about? On that night, she’d pretty much wanted to kill everything that moved. Oh, that was why he wanted it.

She played a couple of samples for him, and he chose a few that he particularly liked. “Yeah, babe, just play those ones on repeat.”

“How much time do we have left?”

He was stretching, moving his neck from side to side. “Enough time for you to tell me how even though you aren’t with me, you’re fighting alongside me in spirit?”

“Do people say things like that?”

“Yeah. They usually say those sorts of things to people who are on suicide missions. It helps blur the lines between being alive and fighting and being dead and fighting. Every freedom fighter needs to believe that his cause is still his even after his heart has stopped. So, if you don’t need to be present to fight. You don’t even need to be alive. You fight on.”

“I’ll kill you if you keep talking about dying,” she snarled. Jenna heard the clamps go down on his pod. Their time was almost done. “I’ll love you forever.”

“Shut up. I’m coming back to you. Seriously though, shut up. I’ll tell you when to start the music.”

Jenna heard the doors crack open.

“Keep your asses on that side of the red line,” Sardius snarled. “I’m here, just like I said I’d be and I’ll let you guys take me, but I am not letting you take anything without Iker. Where is the miserable snot bag?”

A pause. Jenna couldn’t hear if the crew on Don Leo’s ship were talking or not. Her earpiece only picked up Sardius’ voice.

“You should have shown me the inside of his pod before you ejected it. I feel like that violates our bargain, don’t you? I don’t know if he’s aboard that ship and you can’t prove it to me now.”

A second pause.

“Play the music,” he said calmly.

Jenna hit the button.

It came on. It was her favorite, loud, banging, angry music that filled her body with energy and made her ready to draw blood. It was so loud, it was a completely different experience than when she heard the prison riot. She wasn’t sure if the screams were part of the music or if they were a person aboard Don Leo’s ship. If it was Sardius or not, she didn’t know. If he was screaming, hurting, she couldn’t stop that music. It was music for him. She couldn’t even stand for it to drop tempo the way it did at the beginning and ending of a song. She scrolled through versions of the songs until she found mixes that didn’t fade in, but drilled the melody like they were at a dance club.

Jenna sat there listening to the music until Ixy turned it off for her and said, “Don Leo’s ship shifted dimensions. He can’t hear your devil music anymore.”

Jenna looked around her. Everything was the same. She was still in her bedroom. Sardius was still gone, but for some reason, she felt different. Like she had just been dancing with him, somehow, she’d been in his arms and they had been jumping up and down in a light-filled dancehall. Without a word, she was gone from that place. Out of his arms, out of his head, and back in her palace like they had never met.

“What do you think, Ixy?” Jenna asked, feeling like she just got off a tilt-a-whirl.

“We confirmed that Don Leo did eject Iker’s pod. Temptic had his eyes on it from the space station. When he gets there, do you want Temptic to send him straight down?”

“No. I want them to perform a security sweep of his pod and switch him to a new one.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Perhaps only one thing was clear to Jenna at that moment. She was no longer the woman who cried in the dark when she heard the sounds of a fight. She was slowly learning how to bring a fight herself.