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“Hello, Supervisor Meero, it’s — this is Syril Karn, from the Bureau of Standards. I got this number from the internal Imperial directory. I hope you don’t mind me calling, but I — I just wanted to make sure you were okay, after everything that happened. If you don't answer, I'll assume you're doing fine.”
***
There’s a chill in her apartment.
She sits in front of the window. Her hair is down. She hasn’t put anything away properly. Her briefcase has toppled over like a fallen stone relic in the middle of her living room. Her trench coat is crumpled in a useless heap off to the side. It’s going to wrinkle if she leaves it like that. That should bother her. Even the thought of imperfections should bother her.
Even the thought of getting up to fix any of it is exhausting. Hours trickle past. Minutes carve beneath her skin like shrapnel from an explosion. The air tastes like smoke. She sits in front of the window and stares out at the nameless speeders. Thinks about who might be sitting inside. Thinks that she would trade any of them. Any of them for him.
Her throat constricts. You’re hurting me. She tugs at the neck of her tunic with sweaty-cold hands. There is an armada. Her tunic returns equal force. Its threads seem to tighten. They constrict to strangle her like a snake choking its prey. We’re going home. We’re going home as heroes. She gasps. We’ll be together. She gasps again. Like we wanted.
The sunset asks her where he is. She buries her head in her hands. Tastes saltwater.
She won.
She lost.
She stares out at the sky until color drains from it.
She dreams about killing the stars to bring him back.
***
“Hello, Supervisor Meero. It’s Syril Karn. I — guess there isn’t a point to this call, but I thought I’d tell you I had fun, last night. I hope you did, too. That’s all. I, um, hope you’re having a good day.”
***
Grymish comes to find her when the firing stops, and quiet settles over the square. There are a number of bodies. She’d expected that. They needed it. It was essential it appeared Ghorman had fought against an Imperial peacekeeping force, and drastic measures had needed to be taken to ensure safety, security, and the rule of law were upheld. In that, she’d succeeded.
She’d known there would be bodies. She storms out to the balcony and scans them, her heart pounding, as she looks for one in particular. The only one that matters. A brown coat, dark hair, pale skin—
She doesn’t find him, and a clamp around her heart loosens. Perhaps the officer who’d told her he was out there had been mistaken. So many of the Ghormans look alike, and as her informant, he’d adopted their dress. Perhaps he really was still in the building. She’ll find him. She’ll find him, and they’ll talk, and she’ll explain that she never would have been permitted to tell him about the gouge mining but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t want him, that what they have isn’t real, it just means they should probably avoid overlapping their careers in the future if they don’t want to continue to run into slightly uncomfortable scenarios such as these. I would also appreciate it if you apologized for your treatment of me earlier, Syril. I understand emotions were running high, but I won’t permit that going forward. Say you understand.
And then Grymish’s voice sounds from behind her.
“Supervisor?”
Dedra turns to him, half-delirious, smoke coating her throat and three-quarters of a speech drafted in her head.
“Yes?”
“They’ve found him. Karn.”
Of course. Just as she’d thought. Just as she’d known. “Tell them to keep him where he is,” she says, storming off the balcony, brushing past the man in a dreamlike daze. “He’s not to go anywhere without supervision. I need to speak with him immediately.”
No doubt, Grymish will tell her it isn’t safe. That she’ll have to wait until they establish a perimeter. She doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter. It’s Syril, her Syril, they’ve found Syril and no force in the galaxy is going to keep her from him—
“He’s dead, supervisor.” Grymish pauses, his voice tight. “They found his body in the café.”
Everything.
Stops.
Dedra swallows. Scoffs, as nausea rises like a sickly song in her stomach. “That can’t be right.”
“They’re sure,” Grymish counters. “He has Karn’s coat, uniform, and access card.”
He could’ve given those to anyone. If he wanted to get away, if he’d planned for this, he could’ve — “My confidence in them isn’t high.” Her voice shudders, quivers, and she fears it might crack. Control your emotions. “I’ll see for myself.”
“I—don’t know if they’ll allow—”
Dedra’s never cared what they’ll allow. She’s out the door and snapped at two guards to follow her before Grymish has even strung together a coherent thought. Every move she makes seems to rob triple the energy from her that it should — each step feels as if it could fracture her bones, each breath, as if it could split her lungs. She takes the staircase steps so quickly that she misses one and almost collapses, her heel catching on malevolent marble as if the planet itself wants to snap her neck.
It’s not him. It’s not him. It can’t be him.
The square smells of blood, blasterfire, and bile. Bodies are still being cleared. Dedra weaves her way around and through them, stepping numbly on hands, feet, arms, legs as she burns a path toward the café like an asteroid heading for the surface of a planet. Several yards behind her, the guards shout at her to wait. Tell her the situation isn’t completely stabilized, that she should go back to base and they’ll place her request as first-priority once the immediate work is done. To her, in this moment, no work could be more immediate.
Her heart is a stone throwing itself against her ribcage. Her head pounds, every bitter-tasting thought a mallet smacking her skull. She barges into what’s left of the café like the aftershock of an earthquake. Her gaze locks on a helmeted, wide-eyed trooper who reacts to the sight of her like he’s seen a body in the square take a breath. “Supervisor Meero—”
“Where is he?” It comes out as a sort of snap-scream. A howl straining at its leash.
“I—I don’t—” the trooper stutters. “I don’t know who you’re talking ab—”
Crunching, from behind her. Footsteps on broken glass. “She means Karn. Has he been moved already?”
“I wasn’t… I wasn’t in charge of that. My supervisor is—”
Another man wearing black walks in from behind a counter. Dedra loathes him on sight. Nothing feels real. All of these people are manifestations of her nightmares, her worst dreams zippered into flesh and blood. For a wild, manic moment, she considers that she might pull out her blaster and shoot herself with it, if only to wake up.
“What’s the problem out here? We’re still—shit. Supervisor Meero, it’s not safe—”
“Karn. Has he been moved?”
“We’re handling it. They’ll want him sent to Coruscant, won’t they?”
“I don’t know. Isn’t she the one who’d determi—”
“Get her back to base. She can’t be out here.”
Dedra steps forward on leaden legs. He isn’t dead. It isn’t him. “Tell me where he is,” she says, the words seeping from her like pus. “Now.”
One of the useless men heaves a thumb over his useless shoulder. “He’s in the kitchen.” The man pauses for a moment before stiffly adding: “It was the best we could do. Supervisor, we can have him moved to you. I don’t recommend—”
Dedra moves past them, carves a path for herself through the endless and stupid and meaningless blathering of bureaucracy, and walks around the counter and into the kitchen.
It’s him.
Syril.
Her Syril.
They’ve positioned him on the floor, on his back, but it wasn’t gently done — his limbs are splayed at awkward angles, one arm across his torso while the other extends straight out as if he’d been reaching for something. His mouth is open, as are his eyes — his blue, blue eyes, vacant of anything now, their glimmer dulled, broken, gone — and he looks shocked, or perhaps dazed. His brown curls are matted with the garish crimson of dead things where a blaster bolt hit him in the head. He’s covered in a thorough dusting of shrapnel and dirt, some of which has stuck to his waxen skin. He lies there, discarded, an afterthought of the aftermath in a broken-down building.
Dedra stands, although barely. The tremors start in her hands, and they spread to her limbs like a contagion. She stares at him. Blinks a few times, as if the fatal wound on his head is but a trick of the light; as if she’s simply looking at him from the wrong angle, and he’ll get up and dust himself off and make some comment about how he’s torn his coat and now he’ll have to fix it and he doesn’t know if he has the right color of thread. She stares at him. Her vision blurs. Something’s hissing in her ears, and it might be a kriffing grenade, or it might be emotion, or it might be a spider getting ready to sink its fangs into her. She stares at him.
He shouldn’t be dirty. He hates being dirty.
Somehow, the acknowledgement of the grime on his body is what pushes her to move.
On wobbly legs, she crosses the distance between them and kneels at Syril’s side. Her heart screams, claws at itself, wails. Everything within her has shrunk to a lump of twisted-up, rotted, stupid emotion. The last thing he’d done, as far as she knows, was to wrap his hands around her throat and then, the minute he’d let go, he’d told her off and stormed away. Why is she sitting by him now? What draws her to him, even after that? We could have fixed it. We could have fixed it.
I would have fixed it.
The ground of the café rumbles precariously, or perhaps it’s her body trembling. Perhaps there’s no explosion. Perhaps the voices she hears barking out orders at the front of the building are entirely of her creation. Perhaps none of this is real. Perhaps she’ll wake up in bed, her alarm blaring, with Syril’s arms around her.
Her hand reaches out to press against his: his fingers have gone cold, and stiff. There’s nothing left. Syril Karn is gone.
She brushes his hair away from his forehead, smooths his jacket, and, with shaking hands, dusts what dirt that she can manage off of him. It’s a fool’s errand. With things as they are, he’ll be coated again before she’s even left the room. Perhaps I won’t leave, she thinks. All of the words flash through her mind at once in an incoherent, sharp-numb explosion. Perhaps they’ll find me here, next to him. Again, she considers the blaster on her belt. Weighs the intimacy of matching head wounds. Would she feel it, if she pulled the trigger? Would it hurt? Had it hurt, when he —
We were supposed to be heroes. Together.
If he’d just let her explain —
He hadn’t.
He hadn’t let her explain.
Something else explodes. Closer, now. A voice shuffles toward her from the doorway. “Supervisor, you need to get back to base.”
The words are out before her mind has a chance to process them. “I’ll go. Give me a moment.”
More crunching, behind her. She turns. Looks. Whoever it was respected her request and walked away. It’s her and Syril again. Her and Syril, as it was for that one beautiful year on Coruscant. Her and Syril, how it was supposed to be. What they’d wanted. What she’d wanted. What he’d been so cruel as to deny her, when he stormed out of the room and the building and gotten himself killed.
With explosions and anguish simmering in her veins, Dedra leans down to press a kiss to his cold, gritty forehead. Her eyes burn; she forces them shut. A sob lodges itself in her throat. Then she tilts her head and says, directly in his ear:
“You idiot.”
***
“Hi, Superv—Dedra, it’s Syril. If you have some free time this weekend, I thought maybe we could go to dinner? There’s a nice place that just opened up by the Bureau of Standards. I haven’t gone yet, and I thought maybe you would want to go, too. Let me know, when you can. I’d… really like to see you.”
***
Ghorman is a gift. Take it, then win it.
I didn’t want this.
Her mind has shrunk down to contain a single, despairing thought, and it is—
I didn’t want this—
because she didn’t, she didn’t, she didn’t. She hadn’t wanted it when she’d told Krennic her concept at the meeting, and she hadn’t wanted it when Major Partagaz decided for her that she’d accept, and she hadn’t wanted it even as years passed and she’d kept working on the project, and she doesn’t want it as she stands in the transmission room, trembling in the face of what, on flimsi, will be her greatest victory for the Empire. Krennic will pin a medal to her chest, and the point of it will go straight into her heart.
I didn’t want this. I didn’t want this.
Her hands won’t stop shaking, and her lungs don’t seem to remember what to do with air, and her legs have grown too weak to hold her up so she leans against the wall and all but falls over. She pulls at her tunic with nearly enough force to tear it. None of it feels real; her limbs have grown light; her vision, blurred. She barely knows where she is. Barely knows when, or why, or how. Chaos roams with thundering footfalls down the corridor outside, but in here, silence has made ample space for her shock.
I didn’t want this.
There’s nothing in her stomach to come up when she retches. Her body heaves for the sake of heaving. It all seems wrong. False. Dreamlike. If she opens the door to this room, she should see him standing there in his brown coat and his beret, a scarf wrapped around his neck. She should be able to look into his eyes, smile, and tell him they’ve won. That they’re the Imperial heroes they’ve always dreamt of being, and now they can go home and be together for the rest of their lives. They can put this Ghorman mess and everything it entailed behind them.
I didn’t want this.
The floor tilts beneath her. The room spins, a shuttle in a terminal spiral. When she shuts her eyes, she sees his. Cold. Dead. Gone.
Forever.
I didn’t want this.
It’s not important, what she’d wanted.
***
“Hi, Dedra. I’m on my lunch, and I’m moving my things over. I saw you cleared a few drawers, but do you have a preference for which side of the closet you want me to take? I… have some things that need to be hung up. If you have a second, send me a message. I’m going to be here for another half-hour or so.”
***
The nightmares come back tenfold. The nightmares come back worse.
She goes through a period of weeks — a bit over a month — where it’s so bad that she does away with sleep altogether and gives the weight of rest over to a constant stream of stim pills. That, she finds, starts to do strange things to her cognition. She starts to see things, invent things, create things: Syril’s body materializes on her desk at work, or he stands, alive, in her kitchen, or the back of his head is perfectly positioned where she used to watch him watching the sunrise. Exhaustion and stimulants temporarily raise him from the grave. They also threaten to put her in one.
So, after almost collapsing on the transport home and waking on the floor of her bedroom with no memory of how she got there, Dedra decides to ease up on the pills. It’d been a worthwhile experiment, but ultimately, she cannot afford to become careless in her work; she cannot afford to fall behind as everyone, including her former attendant, jostles to get around or climb over her. She lurches down to the shop, buys a pack of sleeping pills, and takes the maximum dose.
That’s when the nightmares scream again.
Sometimes, it’s Ferrix. Sometimes, it’s the rioters, and they’re dragging her along the ground like a butchered animal, and she claws and claws and claws at the dirt until her fingertips run red. Sometimes it’s Ghorman, and she’s watching Syril turn his back on her for the last time, and she knows exactly what’s going to happen and exactly where he’ll end up but her lips are glued shut and she can’t warn him. Sometimes, his hands are the ones dragging her to the Ferrix town square and winding a rope around her neck. Sometimes she wakes up unable to breathe, with a ghost’s fingers locked around her throat.
The worst dreams are the ones that take her back to just after Ferrix, when they were starting out — creeping toward each other, cautious, ready to bolt to safety at any moment. Sometimes, she’ll rest her head on his shoulder as they watch the sunset. Sometimes she’ll come home from work and find dinner on the table, and him wearing his absurd apron and an even more absurd smile. Sometimes she’ll tell him to turn the lights out in her dreams and wake up to find they’re out in reality, and because it all seems to match up, it’ll take too long for the emptiness to hit her and the knowledge to come that he’s not in the refresher, or on the couch, or anywhere, anymore. Sometimes, he kisses her. Sometimes, she kisses him back.
Sometimes she wakes up with tears on her cheeks, and regret like mold in her mouth.
***
“Hi. It’s me. Do you know what type of noodles you want with dinner? They’re out of glowblue. I can check somewhere else, but it might be easier if you just call me. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll assume anything’s fine.”
***
Syril’s funeral is a subdued and sparsely populated affair.
Dedra had seen to it that his body was brought back to Coruscant, but there was no way for him to receive an official ISB ceremony. They’d had to think up a suitable story, and they’d had to do it quickly; so, as far as anyone other than her and Major Partagaz knows, he’d died rushing to aid a few injured Imperial officers. Nothing too heroic. Inspiring, in a mundane sort of way. It’s as good a tale to lay him to rest with as any, she thinks. The café cameras had been damaged beyond repair in the fighting, so she’ll never know how he actually died. She’ll never know who pulled the trigger.
She’ll never know who took him from her.
The unfairness of it scrapes in her as she sits in an empty pew in the back of a building with faded stained glass windows and dusty cushions. A man stands behind a podium and rambles on about Syril’s dedication to his duty, his courage, and his determination to do the right thing even in the face of insurmountable odds. He pronounces Syril’s name incorrectly. Syril’s mother gets up and delivers a watery speech about how her son had given her true purpose in life — as if his only reason for existence was to enrich yours. Another man stands before the dozen or so assembled guests and talks about being honored to keep Syril and his mother out of poverty, because he’d always known his nephew had promise to offer the world. And that, Dedra assumes, is the infamous Uncle Harlo. She’s unimpressed. Someone descends into a loud coughing fit halfway through, and he shuffles out the door, presumably to find a glass of water. He doesn’t come back.
The longer it goes, the deeper disdain sets down roots in her chest. These people might be related to him, but they didn’t know him. They’ll never know him. The thought shouldn’t irk her — after all, it’s not as if Syril’s around to be insulted by his own funeral — but it does.
The moment it’s done, she tries to get out of the place without attracting attention. Eedy corners her at the exit, stepping in front of the door to form a barricade with her frail, old body that seems to have grown frailer and older over the years. For a moment, they stare each other down.
“Dedra,” his mother says, sniffling, her eyes red-rimmed. “Will you walk with me, for a moment?”
A number of excuses flash through her mind. I need to pick up my dry cleaning. I have work to do. And she certainly hasn’t spared Eedy Karn any affection, but — but. The woman had respected Dedra’s terms, once she’d set them down at a dinner that took place so long ago that it now feels like a dream. A dinner that feels as if she’d been a different version of herself when it happened. When she looks in the mirror now, it takes a few seconds for her to recognize her own face; here, now, when she looks at Eedy Karn, she recognizes a piece of herself.
Eedy wraps her bony fingers around Dedra’s wrist and guides her out the door. They come to sit on a bench more chips and cracks than stone, overlooking an empty maintenance corridor: an aimless, lifeless space blooming with gray. The line of clouds overhead promises rain, and the thick, soupy air promises soon.
Eedy takes her in with a surprising lack of judgment or self-righteousness. “It surprised me that you were there, today.” The arrogance in her voice has crumbled, leaving it dry and brittle, like wind whimpering between buildings. “Syril told me you were no longer seeing each other.”
Dedra can’t help raising an eyebrow. “What did he say?”
“Ghorman,” Eedy answers, and it’s so truthful a lie that it tears something within Dedra. Ghorman. It saws to the bone and then snaps. “He was evasive about it. From what I managed to put together, you came to the mutual decision that him being off-planet would put too much stress on your relationship. I tried to convince him otherwise, but, well. You know how he is.” Eedy closes her eyes. Her false lashes glimmer with the ghosts of her tears. “Was.”
It doesn’t matter. None of this matters. She’d freed Syril from this woman, and now here she is, sitting with her on a bench that might crumble at any second. For what? Why? What is the point of any of it? They can sit with each other and reminisce all they like, but none of it will bring him back. He’s not going to climb out of the urn — not in reality, at least. Her nightmares, she’s sure, will show her a different version of it all. Good luck, Dedra.
He hadn’t wanted his mother to know about them. Complicated as they’d been in their final moments, she won’t undo that.
“He held a position of great importance in my life,” Dedra says; she aims for curt, but misses and hits sorrow, instead. A hole has opened in her chest, and she thinks that the more she thinks about him, the wider it’ll expand. It’ll grow until it’s swallowed her. It’ll eat away at her until there’s nothing left. High above her head, thunder rumbles.
“He was different, with you.” Eedy pulls a fabric square out of her pockets and begins dabbing at her cheeks. “He felt seen. Valued.”
The hole widens. It’s a unique kind of agony, this conversation, these memories, his mother’s company: it alternates between jolts of pain and creeping numbness. Everything she knows, and everything Eedy cannot and never will. “I’m glad to hear that.”
“He’d never been with anyone before, to my knowledge. I’d all but given up. I had resigned myself to the possibility that he simply wasn’t interested.”
Memory wraps its fingers around her throat, and Dedra closes her eyes. “Yes. He shared that with me.”
“He so rarely spoke about your relationship.”
If Eedy’s trying to pry at her for details, she’ll spend the rest of her life scratching in useless desperation. “We decided to keep things private,” Dedra says. “He thought that was best.” With only her tone of voice, she adds another sentence: And that hasn’t changed now that he’s gone. She can’t help but feel she’s still protecting him, even when there’s nothing left of Syril to defend but an unfeeling pile of ashes. A pile of ashes, a pile of unanswered questions, and the decay rotting in her stomach. Thunder chimes in, grumbling its agreement.
To Dedra’s great shock, Eedy places a bony hand over hers. Dedra almost recoils — almost pulls away in disgust — but the sincere sadness in the woman’s gaze stops her. So much about Eedy Karn had broadcasted manufactured falseness to Dedra, at that dinner. The layers and layers of makeup, the clothing bright enough to be seen from Coruscant’s atmosphere, the unsolicited relationship advice and attempts to position herself and Harlo as the sole guiding lights in Syril’s life. He hadn’t hated his mother, but he hadn’t been overly fond of her, either. Dedra wonders what he’d think if he could see her now.
“I knew my son.”
A few haphazard drops of water fall on Dedra’s forehead. She stiffens, bracing for an admonishment. You took him from me, Eedy seems to be saying. You withdrew him from my life, and now he’s dead. How does that make you feel? The hole in Dedra’s chest threatens to drown her, threatens to pull her in, eat her alive, and dissolve her bones in a sludge of numb-nauseated anger. You knew your son, and I knew the man I —
Eedy’s hand squeezes hers. Dedra’s skin crawls. Rain begins to fall in earnest. “I knew my son,” Eedy repeats herself firmly, “and he loved you.”
The hole has consumed her. Nothing feels real, anymore — not the frigid droplets on her skin, not Eedy’s leathery hand, and certainly not the inevitability that she will have to stand up from this bench, take a transport back to her flat, and crawl into an empty bed. There’s so much nothing, she thinks, her chest tight. There’s more nothing than she’s ever understood. A planet crammed with trillions of beings, and to her, it’s vacant.
It takes an unfathomable amount of energy for her to generate two short syllables.
“I know.”
They sit together in the rain and let the storm lend words to the unutterable.
***
“Hi. I… didn’t like the way we left things. I’m calling to tell you I’m sorry. I know it’s the middle of the day, and you’re probably in a meeting, but it’s bothering me and I needed to let you know. You were right. I’m sorry. I’ll see you later.”
***
He’d left a few things in her apartment when he’d left for Ghorman. That had been for the sake of practicality, or so they’d said; there was no way of knowing how long he’d be gone, but once the assignment was over, he’d be moving back to her flat. It didn’t make sense for him to take the items that didn’t fit Ghorman’s climate, and he’d thought he should keep at least one complete Bureau of Standards uniform and one suit in her closet, just in case, and he’d either forgotten his apron or intended to buy one made from Ghorman fabric. A container of hair gel and a jar of cologne still sit on her refresher counter, silently waiting for him to come home like pets waiting by a door.
In any case, component pieces of him linger. Her attitude toward those left-behind items varies by the day; sometimes they’re a warm fire to sit beside, and sometimes they’re a knife between her ribs. One day, consumed by a fit of practicality, she’d started to round them up with the intent of tossing them out — she won’t use them, and he’s not here to use them and he never will be again, so it’s all just taking up space. She makes it as far as dumping his Standards uniform on the floor before she adjourns to the refresher to bend over the toilet and throw up a vile combination of breakfast and grief.
His shirts smell like him long after his side of the bed has forgotten the weight of his form. It’s by accident that she discovers they keep the nightmares at bay. The day she’d tried to get rid of his belongings, she’d ultimately pulled one of his Standards button-downs off the hanger and wrapped herself in it before going to bed. The dreams had been quieter, that night — they’d nipped at her and left only a bruise or two, instead of rending flesh from bone.
So, because it worked the first time, she tries it again, and it works a second. And a third. And before long, she’s adopted pieces of his work uniform as her sleeping one; his shirt becomes a shield to protect her against the never-satisfied ghouls that slip through the bars of the past to terrorize her in the present. She wakes up with the scent of him on her body and the memory of him hurting and healing her. A slap, and an embrace. It feels as close to right as she’ll ever be again, and she decides that there’s no downside to adopting a mirage as reality so long as it has no impact on her career. If anything, she’s benefitting from it. She sprays his cologne in the air, feels the softness of his shirt on her body like his skin on her skin, and she decides she’s created a dream — or a nightmare — worth carving out something that resembles a life in. And that’s what he’d want, wouldn’t it? He’d want her to keep going; for the Empire’s sake as much as her own. He’d had his doubts in those last moments on Ghorman, but he’d believed in the mission, and he’d believed in her as the only person capable of carrying it out. She’ll carry him with her as she does.
Renewed motivation doesn’t eliminate the emptiness in her chest, nor does it fill the silence in her apartment or heat the cold, stagnant air. His absence darkens every shadow and grows and grows inside her, cancerous, a formless growth no medical droid can cut out. Some days, it’s all she can do to put down her briefcase, pull on his shirt, and sit on the couch to watch the sunset. Some days, she imagines he’s still there; can practically feel him in the kitchen, vibrating with nervous energy. She’d not go so far as to talk to him. She knows he’s gone. But stars, she wishes could hear his voice.
On a drizzly day, wedged between two dull meetings and on deadline for a dull incarceration report, she comes to the conclusion that she still can.
When she gets home, she doesn’t bother removing her hat or her coat. She goes straight for her bedside drawer and pulls out her old personal-use comlink. She hasn’t used the device in a few months, since she’d been issued a new, upgraded version after Ghorman. Technically, she’d been meant to turn in the old one for recycling, but as with several tasks of note not directly related to her work after Syril’s death, she’d left it go. The technology division had never followed up, and she’d forgotten it until she’d thought about talking to him.
Her hands shake as she presses the button to power up the device. It doesn’t respond immediately, and for a sickening moment, she considers that it might’ve grown so out of date that it no longer works — that she’ll have to drag it to some back-alley repair shop, and pay extra for the owner’s discretion in not inquiring as to who she is, how she acquired an obsolete Imperial comlink, and why she’s willing to pay such a hefty sum to have it fixed. Thankfully, she’s spared the embarrassment. The device takes its time and seems to relish its defiance of her, but it does, in the end, flicker to life.
With her heart in her throat, Dedra clicks familiar buttons until she finds what she’s looking for. Before she can press play, she sets the device down on her bed and shrugs off her uniform. She folds it as well as she cares to manage, and then she changes into the piece of clothing that keeps her from unraveling. Retrieving the comlink, she crosses the white-gray space and settles down on the couch.
There’s warmth in her apartment as she sits in front of the window. The emptiness has faded, at least for now, and if she looks just right at the bars of sunlight streaming through the window she can carve out the shape of him in their glow.
She closes her eyes, takes a shivery breath, and presses play.
***
“Hi, it’s me. I know you don’t want me contacting you at this number while I’m gone, so I’ll be brief, but I just wanted to tell you that I miss you, and I love you. I know it’s necessary, and I’m honored that you recommended me for this, but it’s hard to be away from you. I’m really looking forward to coming home.”