Jane jumped up, eyes wide open, and found herself sitting on top of the large bed she had spent the last few nights in. She was panting, sweat dripping down her skin as she awoke from that horrible nightmare. God above, she couldn't recall the last time she had such an awful dream. She'd been fighting with Leonne in it, and badly wounded her too. She idly ran a hand over her shoulder, half expecting to find a scar. Even in a dream Leonne gives as good as she gets, Jane thought to herself, a faint smile on her face as she shook off the last remnants of the dream. Then she looked up and saw Leonne standing there, arms crossed. There was a certain wariness on her face and her usual playfulness had completely evaporated. Then she spotted Mentuc, standing a bit to her friend's side. Lightly crouched. Eyes visibly trained on her, even from behind those sunglasses. He was holding the Imperial black box, its small antenna still radiating with that blue light.

'Oh God,' Jane whispered, a shiver running through her spine. She brought a hand up to her nose, carefully, touching it. It should be broken, she realised. She looked up at the pair in front of them, a deep fear rooting in her heart as the sheer intensity of Mentuc's gaze bore down on her, but that paled compared to the horrible truth that seeped its way into her mind. She opened her mouth and couldn't find the words.

'No, Jane,' Leonne began, her eyes too knowing and stuck between fear, anger and pity. 'That was no dream.'

'I...' she stammered, her mind unable to deal with the mountain of consequences that went with that simple statement.

Leonne grabbed a chair and put it down in front of her, narrowly flanked by her husband who was regarding her carefully. For once she couldn't blame him. Then Leonne leaned over the back of the chair and crossed her arms and a shimmer of her friend's natural character came through in the form of a smile. 'I've been thinking on how to explain this to you. Hell, I wasn't even sure if I should tell you what really went down. In the end it boils down to the following, you've been psionically brainwashed to hate the Empire beyond rational thought.'

Jane bristled at those words and immediately regretted it, the memories of her launching herself at her friend coming back to the front. Leonne smile broadened, however, even if she had to gesture at Mentuc to keep him from moving in between the two of them. Jane picked her next words with extreme care, stuck between her immense hate for the Empire and knowing that something was off. 'I hope you won't hold it against me when I ask you to elaborate. And provide proof.'

Leonne tilted her head. 'That's about natural, isn't it? For starters, you did try to murder me,' her friend began, her lips curling downward at the memory. Then a smile broke through again, if somewhat forced. 'So I reckon we're equal for me lying to you earlier.'

Jane didn't laugh, but she appreciated the attempted return to a semblance of normalcy.

'There's a lot to cover, isn't there?' Leonne began. 'Saying that you're brainwashed is insane enough to start with, then there's the rest.'

'Your husband,' Jane replied, feeling vitriol sneak back into her voice despite herself.

Leonne turned to look at the black box, a look of confusion on her face.

'No,' came the voice from earlier. 'I undid the brainwashing, but that doesn't mean a lifetime of hating the Empire disappears just like that. I can guarantee that she won't try to kill you again over it, though.'

Jane shivered at the sound of that voice. It made her feel as if she was being watched and not in the good way. More akin to a frog that's about to be vivisected, looking up at a curious, scalpel-wielding student. She ran her hand over her shoulder and another thought blinked to the front. 'My wounds,' she whispered. 'How... What...'

'They have been healed,' stated the strange voice. 'So have Leonne's wounds. I'm quite sure you have a lot of questions in that regard. You can safely assume that all of that is my doing, but more than that I will not divulge.'

'Imperial technology,' Jane hissed, her nails digging into her unblemished skin. She felt disgusted at the thought of anything Imperial having touched her, yet at the same time her earlier actions haunted her mind. She had attacked Leonne over it. Attacked her best friend. She remembered it all with perfect clarity. How she had relished when Leonne had gotten hurt, the raw rage rampaging through her system and the overwhelming desire to murder the girl she shared so many good memories with. It overwhelmed what disgust she felt for the Empire. As Leonne had pointed out, the Empire was a beast six centuries dead. Her friend was in the here and now.

She looked up, staring at the impassable face of Mentuc. He gave away nothing. Then she looked at Leonne. She finally noticed that the woman's limbs were trembling slightly. How did I overlook that? she wondered. She was dazed, confused, angry and scared out of her mind, but Leonne was in the same situation. Probably worse, as at this point Jane understood that her friend carried some grave secrets with her. The very things that had confined the outgoing woman to a farm with her enigmatic, Imperial husband.

'I...' she began, before swallowing loudly. She forced aside her emotions as best she could and gave Leonne a short nod. 'I will listen.' Her voice was laced with fear, an emotion she saw mirrored in her friend's eyes. Despite what had transpired, despite having not seen one another in years, they bond between them remained as powerful as ever.

Leonne opened her mouth to speak but the person controlling the black box beat her to it. 'If it is any consolation,' the disembodied voice said with something similar to pity, 'this isn't your fault. What happened is the product of something far larger than you are. You are not a violent person by nature. You normally listen to logic and reason, especially when it concerns your passion for history. You were simply used to promote the blind hate of the Empire.'

Jane raised herself, instinctively drawn to argue back against that, but the blue light blazed brightly and she shrunk back.

'Do not mistake my words,' the black box continued. 'Hating the Empire is not something I find either weird or unacceptable. It is the blind part of it that you should heed. You hated the Empire to an irrational degree, regardless of any other arguments that were proposed and when Leonne pushed you into a corner about it, you lashed out, violently so. You tried to silence her. Because that is what the puppetmaster wants. Nobody is allowed to question why the Empire should be hated beyond anything else.'

Despite her own thoughts and beliefs, Jane found herself agreeing with the mysterious contact. She had held too many debates about history, lost too many marks for not being objective enough about recent themes, to not understand the importance of objectivity and keeping emotions out of research.

'I take it that you now accept your uncharacteristic assault on Leonne as proof that something was wrong with your brain?' the voice continued. When Jane nodded demurely, it continued. 'Next on, to resume with what I had originally come to do, I will provide you with information about the Empire. Specific information that you will not be able to acquire from any "official" sources.' The woman controlling the black box sneered at the word. 'I am the galaxy's foremost expert when it comes to knowledge of the elusive Genesis Battalion. And I offer you footage of them in frontline action. Genuine footage. I won't spoil much about it, I want you to draw your own conclusions about it.' Then, with a smile that Jane could hear through the speakers, the voice added one final thing. 'I am willing to bet that it will be nothing like you imagined.'

Onoelle watched Jane near instant change with wonder. The Historian within her was drooling at the thought of acquiring information about the Genesis. Seeing her friend behave like her old, normal self again gave her a sense of profound relief. She smiled at he sight. Never thought that I'd welcome seeing that obsession of hers. It was highly interesting to watch from a professional point of view, as the concept of psionic brainwashing and its many effects on the human psyche were an unexplored field. She was studying her friend carefully and noted that the brainwashing apparently suppressed a part of the normal behaviour patterns. It likely needed to do so to keep a hormonal burst from temporarily pushing against it. She wasn't an expert when it came to neuroscience, but having a set of violently conflicting orders in your head couldn't possibly be healthy. Mentuc had put down the little box on a table and was rearranging some furniture and closing the blinds, creating an impromptu movie theatre and while Jane still kept her distance from him, it was less than before. She was too occupied by prodding NIghtmare with questions about Imperial history.

'There only was the single battalion, yes. They were never reinforced either. Any losses they took were never replaced,' she heard Nightmare say.

'But that doesn't make sense!' Jane immediatley replied. 'Even Nemesis, who was even more infamous for being active on every front there was, constantly received reinforcements. A single, frontline battalion would have run out of men before long!' Jane protested.

'They were a reinforced battalion,' Nightmare countered. 'Two thousand and five hundred men strong originally.'

'I can accept that,' Jane admitted. 'the missions they undertook hinted at the fact that they weren't a normal sized unit, but it doesn't diminish my point! I am wiling to accept that to a certain degree some reports were amended a bit, that people either over or underestimate the number of troops in the field, but they were a unit that was active throughout the entire conflict!' Jane yelled. 'We're talking about three quarters of a century of constant warfare and they are mentioned everywhere!'

'I am not denying that,' said Nightmare sweetly, a teasing purr in her voice.

Onoelle had to keep herself from laughing out loud. Now that the situation had taken a drastic turn towards something resembling normalcy, due to Jane's absolute obsession for history having returned to the fore, she was at liberty again to be terribly amused by the situation. Jane had no idea who she was arguing with. Nightmare was dangling out precious bits of information and promises of more in front of Jane and her friend was jumping at them with fervour.

'It wasn't so that they did not want to be reinforced, but rather that they couldn't.'

'Oh come on now,' Jane protested. 'It wasn't until the civil war started taking its toll half a century in that the Empire began to run out of troops and ships.'

'That depends on your definition of it, really. However, the Genesis soldiers couldn't just be recruited,' Nightmare said, finally reaching the core of the case.

'What do you mean?' her friend asked, her brow furrowing. 'I'm assuming you're not referring to the usual level of training people have to go through in order to become special forces?'

'Do you remember when I said that Genesis wasn't a crack battalion of elite soldiers? I wasn't lying. Genesis was something unique. I don't know the full extent of what you have access to, but if you were to check the equipment manifest of the Genesis Battalion, you'll notice that the vast majority of what they used, weapons, armour, provisions, everything, wasn't used by any other unit.'

Jane finally realised she was hovering over the black box, leaning down dangerously close to it, and withdrew herself to a more normal position. Her eyes were still ablaze with a hunger for knowledge and Onoelle failed to suppress a chuckle, earning her the immediate attention of every other person in the room, Mentuc going as far as to physically turn his head towards her, which spoke volumes about how much she had surprised him. She didn't blame him. She had gone from frightened and wary to calm and collected in a remarkably short time. She couldn't help it, the two of them had spent countless evenings studying like this and it was a comforting rhythm to fall back in, even if she now had her equally comfortable husband around her. And her husband had put her through far worse paces than this, all things considered. Then she realised Jane was staring at her, half an accusation in her eyes.

She raised her arms in defence and the chuckle turned into a short laugh. 'Sorry,' she said. 'It's just so adorable to see you like this, Jane. I've missed it. I remember you hovering like that over your datapads while you were writing your thesis.'

Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.

Jane gave her friend a guilty smile. 'I guess I did, didn't I?' she mused softly. 'Always been a bit of a geek when it comes to history.'

'Bit of an understatement, that,' Onoelle teased gently, already spotting the telling signs that her friend was about to abandon their conversation to hop back on track.

'Anyway,' Jane said, following Onoelle's expectations to a T. 'If they had unique equipment... Something was different about them, then. Psionics?' she mumbled, not noticing Mentuc freezing temporarily at the comment. 'No, unlikely,' she continued. 'There is nothing to support that theory and there's no shortage of combat evidence.'

'Is there any evidence of Genesis going up against psionically gifted forces?'

Silence reigned for a moment as both Jane and Onoelle looked around the room, searching for the person who had just spoken. I took them a moment to realise that the question had been voiced by Mentuc. Onoelle immediately spotted the hard lines in his face and the way his fingers were latching on to objects that weren't there. She recognised the signs instantly. His eidetic memory was acting up and she knew exactly which battle was going through his head.

'Jane, take the black box and go to Cassy,' she commanded, lacing her voice with authority as she quickly walked over to Mentuc, waving her hand in front of him to keep his attention on her. 'Mentuc, look at me.' Her husband tilted his head and she noticed the lines of his face pulling taut. 'Mentuc!' she said, raising her voice. His face snapped up and she quickly closed the remaining distance. She turned slightly and found Jane hovering at the door, throwing her a tentative look. She threw her friend a withering glare and pointed towards her. 'Go!' Jane paled at the sound of the urgency in Onoelle's voice and vanished.

'Mentuc,' she said as she turned back towards her husband, voicing the words slowly. 'Take off your sunglasses. Look at me.' He obliged her but she could tell he was doing it subconsciously, his mind fighting itself to stay in the present. His arms shocked back and forth in the movement, instincts screaming at him to draw his weapon. She knew he was back at the battle of Rislaa, fighting against the so called Shadows of Dorcha. The first battle where Genesis had outnumbered the enemy. The first battle where they had needed it and one that had left deep scars in Mentuc's psyche.

His lenses began darting around in his eyes, all going towards separate directions and she rushed over towards him, just in time to see him take a step back. She closed the remaining distance in a jump and grabbed him by the face. 'Look at me!' she repeated, louder. His mouth fell open and he took another step backwards, dragging her with him. She heard him whisper, short and sharp words. He had begun giving orders in Imperial. She had taken to studying the language when she had begin figuring out what he was and at this point she was fluent enough to understand most of it, even if part of the military jargon still escaped her. She had tried to get Mentuc to teach her the full language, as many words gained or lost meaning depending on the context and intonation, it was a slow and difficult progress. Still, her grasp on it was solid enough to recognise the raw urgency and disgust in his voice. He was reliving the memories, seeing his men get slaughtered.

She shouted his name again, jamming her fingers up his nose. This was the first real PTSD attack he was suffering from in a long time, but that didn't make it any less dangerous. She was relatively safe from his attacks, but his surroundings most definitely weren't and if he decided he needed to throw her into cover, she'd break bones. All of that was irrelevant to her, however. Mentuc was hurting. Badly so. She remembered how he looked after such an episode and shivered. No, she thought to herself as her determination steeled itself. I'll not let him go through that again. She heard him call out names, bark orders and relay fields of fire to pin down the Shadows as they blinked forward and mercilessly threw Genesis soldiers around like dolls, slamming them into walls and crushing their internals.

He calmed somewhat when her fingers got to the sensitive parts in his nose, the shock pulling him to the present, and for a moment he blinked and his lenses settled on her, briefly breaking out of the memories. She capitalised on that, pulled herself up and wrapped her legs around him to keep him from jumping away from her. 'Listen to my voice,' she intoned, ramming her forehead against his, forcing him to look straight into her eyes. She felt her sore muscles scream in protest as she clung to him, but ignored them. Mentuc needed her. She was the only one who could pull him out of this. 'Good. You can see me. Keep looking. Tell me what you see.' She felt his chest rise and fall against hers as his breath came out in quick pants, saw his lenses overlap as he took her in and felt his skin crinkle against hers as his eyes narrowed.

'Leonne?' he whispered, unsure.

'No', she whispered back. 'Onoelle. Think back. When we first met. When you caught me at the foot of the Wall. When you saved me in the storm. When you picked me up on the wall of the cliff. When you hunted down the wild cows. When you built the farm. Every stage of it. Remember when I first kissed you. Remember when you first kissed me. Our discussions about what it means to be human. You teaching me Imperial. Me teaching you normal behaviour. Our first night together. Our day of marriage.'

She kept listening things, going deeper and deeper into detail and watching his eyes closely, drawing in a deep breath of relief when his haunted look began to fade a little. She didn't stop, continuously reminding him of memories of his life as a civilian while withdrawing her fingers slowly from his nose, moving them to his ears. His breath was still coming out in quick gasps as if he'd just run a marathon, but that wild, panicked glimmer began to lessen on his face. Ever so slightly. Then his eyes turned far again, gaining that infamous thousand yard stare as his eidetic memory threw him back into the middle of that horrid battle. She focused and kept telling him to remember key parts of his life, countering the worst parts of his past with good memories. She used more than the ones they shared; she dug up things from his past as a Genesis as well. She knew little about the Empire in total, but she made up for that with being intimately familiar with him. There were plenty of battles were Genesis had dominated the field, gaining key victories while suffering zero casualties, and she focused on those. She listened attentively to his voice, recognised by what he was saying where he was in the battle. Her mind was working overtime, reliving the campaign with him and for every bad memory he ran into, she selected a good one and injected it into his mind.

It was a thin line to walk. She had long ago learned how to deal with these episodes and knew that if she selected the wrong memories he'd slip back into his past fully. Vector's chest being perforated by a steel beam while he, Nightmare, Spotter, Valiant and Shredder poured massed fire on a singular Shadow was countered by her reminding him of how the same group took down a Novican walker on Lufer. The next memory in line was the Shadow crushing Shredder within her armour even as the massed fire took it down. She brought up how he had saved a child's life by sheltering it with his own body in turn. His arm twitched instinctively when his mind conjured the memory of a powerful shot taking off his arm. Mentuc's hand landed on Onoelle's thigh with all the force of a jackhammer, cracking the bone underneath and rupturing the skin. She gritted her teeth and forced her mind to overcome the pain. Grabbing hold of his arm, she tapped her ring against his. The sound rang out cleanly and cut into his visions, across the imagined battlefield and reached him, pulling him slightly more out of his flashback.

She quickly lost track of time. Past and present were woven together into an intricate pattern that she continuously tackled, preventing Mentuc from slipping too deeply and losing himself. She hung on his lips, every word he uttered aligning with a memory she had to recognise and counter in time. Every blow he received, every death he witnessed, every wound he took, she confronted with a blow struck, a life saved, an objective protected. She ransacked her mind, ran through entire libraries worth of memories, plundered them all, desperate to stay ahead of the ravine that Mentuc's psyche threatened to fall into. Occasionally he twitched or spasmed and every time she took another hit, but she held firm, bearing every blow stoically and stubbornly refused to let go of him. She ran her fingers across his ears, his eyes, his nose and lips, forcing him to pay attention to her, to the present. She plinked her ring against his on key moments, the shrill sound providing them both with a much needed anchor that allowed her to safely coast him through key moments.

It was an arduous task, one that brooked no excuses, had no tolerance for failure. Either she kept him constantly locked to the present or he'd fully fall, submerging himself in his violent past and all that it entailed. The collateral damage he caused was insignificant to the raw wounds those attacks left on his psyche, every episode only serving to deepen the trauma. She whispered sweet memories to him as he trashed around, sweat running down his body and seeping into his clothes. She wasn't looking much better, ugly bruises discolouring her skin in numerous places while blood trickled out of a handful of wounds. Still she continued, unwilling to back down. This was the one thing she could do that no one else, not even Nightmare, could do for him and she'd be damned before she'd allow herself to fail!

Hours slid by. Her battle with exhaustion grew just as demanding as the one she fought for Mentuc's mental health. Her one advantage was that she had managed to make him lay down, even though he had knocked her off earlier when he had flipped himself, instinct forcing him to lay flat on his belly. It had been better than the alternative, which meant he would have been laying on top of her. She had the rogue thought that she didn't particularly object to the idea of dying underneath her husband, but she would rather he was focused on her at the time. Then Mentuc had slammed his hand out in front of him, denting the floor in the process, and she had no room left to think about anything but him once again. The only solace she had in the long running war with his past, was that she knew the flow of the short campaign. His mind jumped from one pitched battle to the next, his eidetic memory incapable to stop the flow of memories, and she jumped along with it, accompanying her husband as he and his brothers-in-arms fought out the heated conflict within the confines of his mind.

On and on it went and Onoelle found herself growing beyond tired. Her mind felt sluggish and slow. Exhaustion and pain tugged on her body, demanding her attention, attention she couldn't spare. She didn't know if she was running on determination, automated processes or stubbornness and at this point she didn't care. All she had room for in her mind was Mentuc. His rapid heartbeat, the dilation of his eyes, the sharp and dangerous twitches of his limbs, the way his lips moved as he kept on calling out orders to people long since dead. Her thoughts were closely interlinked with his as she ran alongside him as Genesis finally breached the gate of the Clanhold on Rilaa. She fell back beside him as a withering psionic barrage tore through the frontline of the battalion and gritted her teeth with him as the final clash commenced, the three day long campaign nearing it's bloody climax. She countered the death of Valiant with the memory of Shredder and Spotter saving the squad from annihilation as they destroyed an incoming artillery barrage. She cheered with him as the exhausted Shadows, weary of three days of fighting, began falling back to the inner sanctum, pulling down walls as they went. As the final attack began and the last of the traumatic memories began to run its course, she reminded him that a minute after the last two Genesis soldiers died, the rest of the battalion would enter the inner sanctum and tear apart what few Shadows that remained.

With a loud gasp, Mentuc's mind tore itself loose from the chokehold of his painful past. As he coughed, Onoelle saw his head turn around as he took in his surroundings and shake of the disorientation that such flashbacks irrevocably caused. Then she could sustain her own consciousness no longer and she collapsed, out cold even before her head landed on the floor.