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When he clasped my arms and gazed into my eyes something perverse in me woke; something I hadn't realized existed. Vulnerable, dying, murdered at my hands; suddenly he was infinitely desirable.
I hadn't dreamed that possible. No, I'd been obsessed with him, with fighting him, even when he wasn't there, but now... my gut went cold and clenched tight even as I ached with desire. It was sick, it was wrong, but fortunately, the men gathered around to blow my head off weren't going to give me a chance to fall to the temptation to fuck Blake's corpse.
I grinned at the perversity of my life and the fitness of my fate. No doubt the security vids would show this as a tragic misunderstanding, a falling-out of malcontents, even a lover's quarrel. But none of the viewers would know the near-orgasmic pleasure it gave me to fire my gun randomly into their ranks. And then they shot me.
I used to avoid pain, but when I found it inescapable, I'd learned to endure it. When had I learned to embrace it? To desire it. To desperately need it for completion?
I fell beside Blake, numbing hands desperately trying to drag the gun up, to force them to end it, to end me, to end the tangle of twisted impulses that ruled me.
And for once a plan worked. I would have laughed if I had the breath. My body arched backward, and the blasts drove me away from Blake. I reached towards him, blindly, but fell short with a boot grinding my wrist into the floor. Never surrender. Never...
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I miss.
No. I try again.
I ...can't. My hand passes through the gun as if it were smoke. The troopers move closer to Blake. And I see... his blood is still flowing. He's not dead. Not dead.
I start to move towards him, but something tugs at my feet. I look down. At me. The blood is still, the expression slackening. One corner of my lip is raised, clinging dryly to a bared tooth.
It's not been a good day. And I don't even make a good-looking corpse.
All this runs through my mind in a fractional instant, and then I reach down and snap the misty cord linking me to the body I once inhabited. If I were the philosophizing type, I would consider the matter in detail. Instead I attack the guards.
I'm pleased to discover that I can affect them. I plunge my fist into the nearest one's chest and grasp his heart. I pour my hate and rage into my grip, and the man chokes and staggers back, clutching at his chest. This disconcerts the others long enough for me to repeat my action on every guard who approaches Blake or who aims a weapon at him.
It's exhausting in a way I can't explain. Ridiculously, I find myself standing astride Blake, panting for breath I can't use, with lungs I no longer own. Apparently my energy is finite. I need more. I feel... Blake. Somehow, he senses my need and offers... no. I will not take his energy. He needs what little he has.
The guards are panicking, shouting about defense fields, and clustering together. I sense that Blake would not like what I am about to do, but what choice have I? I must have energy to defend him, to keep him safe until he dies. I touch a guard and ... damn... if he won't give up the energy, I find I can't take it. In frustration I slam a fist into a console.
The energy pours into me in a silver glitter cascade; from the guards' reaction they can see it. My back arches and I scream silently. It hurts. Worse than dying. But I hold my hand in the energy field, until I can contain no more. I break loose.
And I grin.
The room is dim now, lit only by pale blue emergency lights. I rub my fingertips together and sparks emerge. The guards face me. I point at one and send a lance of light through him. The scream is very satisfying. Another. And another. And... they are fleeing, screaming. I think perhaps they hear my laughter.
Full of energy I return to Blake. Carefully I ...well, there are no words, but apparently my understanding of electronics and power and computers... well... I can control the energy. I send it down the pathways of disruption, the disruption I have caused. I cauterize the bleeding, tease cells into rejoining, encourage bone marrow to produce more red cells, and always I trickle energy in microscopic quantities to his mitochondria. Energy is life. Live, Blake. Lungs, breathe. Heart, beat. Life. I took it from you. Let me give it back.
Dimly I am aware of motion around me. Not enemies. More of Blake's rabble. Blake takes a breath. Shallow, shaky, but on his own. The rabble are trying to get at him, to help him. All right. I get up and look around the room. My crew. They're not much, but I meant to give them to Blake. I still have energy to spare and none of them are as near death as he was.
As long as I'm at it, I help several of Blake's people, including the woman I'd shot. Then I consider my own body. No hope there. Massive energy disruption—no telling how many shots the guards poured into it. The brain in particular is... no. You can't store energy in a shattered battery.
All the wounded are carried out. The last of the rebels sets timed charges around the room and then runs to rejoin the others. They've left my body. Pity. I've got Orac's key in my pocket. But then, it never did me any good.
I sit and wait for the bombs. I'm curious to know what will happen.
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Somehow.
I will slide my non-existent self through the interstices in the rubble.
Or not.
I will concentrate my mind on thinking myself to the surface.
Or not.
I will use my energies to blast a path upward. Or downward. Anywhere.
Or not.
Fuck.
I will 'sit' here while the damn planet erodes around me apparently.
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Or an abacus.
I could then compute how long until the heat-death of the universe. All energy, including my own, must eventually run down.
Of course, even if I could compute that inconceivably long span of time, I have no way of calculating how much time has already passed. I don't even have a pulse to count.
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After all, I have no hormones, no nerve endings, no organs to engorge and twitch. All that awkward activity is really quite absurd when viewed from the outside, but so very vital when you're a participant. Which I'm not. Ever again.
But it passes the time waiting for eternity to end. It's better than designing electronics mentally, or playing virtual chess against myself.
So. Back to sex. As I recall it, Anna was very, very good. All the acquiescence of a whore, and all the innovation of a seductress, wrapped up in the lure of the forbidden, not only because she was already married, but because she wanted so much that I couldn't provide. Or course, I took that as a challenge, the same way I'd started fiddling with the banking system more because I was bored with my job and annoyed with my superiors than for any other reason. I was reasonably content with life on Earth, and would probably have siphoned off moderate amounts over a lengthy period of time rather than risk the inconvenience of fleeing for my life.
I'd had a few men, too. I didn't generally care for men because it tended to degenerate into powerplays and interminable emotional arguments which were not only tiring and bad for my digestion, but which took up far too much time. I really resented the loss of productive time more than anything else. Even more than the time one of them destroyed my flat and stole everything not fastened down. My insurance covered the material loss, but you can't get time back.
Life is too short to waste.
As I wasted it, now that I look back. I'd started out with powerplays and interminable emotional arguments with Blake. I should have been fucking him all along.
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Hell, gigantic alien grasshoppers looking for a place to lay their eggs.
I don't care. It's something different.
Energy. Machinery. Ah. Force-lifters. Not noticeably different from the ones I recall, so all right, eons haven’t passed. It just felt that way.
Vila. That's Vila. I'm astonished that'd he'd return here. He doesn't look any different. That narrows the time scale even further. A few months, perhaps. He hasn't cut his hair lately, what there is of it.
The lifters are replaced by men with hand-tools. What can they be seeking to retrieve? Oh. Yes. The key.
Being buried hasn't done my corpse any favours. Vila is an interesting shade of pea-green when he notices it and shouts, jumping back and pointing as if it's going to sprout fangs and leap on him. It's only a body, Vila.
Oh. Damn. Blake. I should have known. Blake doesn’t look too bad. Actually, he looks rather well. Someone apparently took advantage of his incapacitation to repair his scarred eye. And he's lost weight. He looks fit. He moves the way he used to, on Liberator. He leaps down into the excavation and personally wraps my remains in heavy plass and puts it on a lifter. Really, you could get the key without all that. Vila will have told you where I always kept it, close to my heart, once you left and I didn't have to share it, or the ship, or leadership, or... anything.
They take my body, and I find myself going with it. Maybe if they cremate it, I'll dissipate.
Hell of a thing to hope for; nothingness. Still, it'd be better than boredom.
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If he's planning on keeping me as a souvenir... no. I won't have it. If he doesn't decently dispose of me soon, I'll take the energy from the stasis box, as many stasis boxes as it takes before he gets the idea.
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What? That's... Cally!
No.
That can't be. She's dead and I'm dead, so we should be able to see each other and obviously this woman doesn't see me.
What the hell is going on?
Oh. I recognize that building. It's one of the pre-fabs we gave Franton and Payter. This must be Kaarn, and she must be a clone made from Cally's line—well, that makes sense. Cally's sister selected the ones to be saved, naturally she'd include her own. But I didn't give them a cell sample. Or permission to take one after I'd died.
It's ... not easy always to hear them. But I can tell that this Cally-like is not going along with Blake's smiles and waves at my box. Good for you. Tell him to get stuffed. I don't want a nice, new, shiny, force-grown Avon-like to be created. Why? To look good standing next to Blake in rebel posters? To infuriate Servalan.... well, actually, that's a reason I wouldn't mind.
But it's the principle of the thing. I didn't agree to it, and it's my body. I've got the patent rights to it.
But Blake is persuasive. I see her expression change, and finally she nods. Just because I killed Blake doesn't give him the right to bring me back to life! I suck the energy from the stasis unit in a fit of pique but it does no good. They draw cells and take them away.
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"Avon."
I look at Blake. He's chased everyone away, and now he's sealing the doors. "I know you're there. I've known ever since I felt you on Gauda Prime."
It's your imagination. I wish.
Blake begins taking his clothes off.
I don't think I like where this is heading, Blake. I know you have serious delusions of godhood, but this is too much. I'm dead. That pretty body on the table, that you didn't have impressed with any memories or personality... that's just so much meat. I don't know what to call what you obviously intend to do. Not necrophilia since it was never alive and isn't dead, either. Of course, I'm hardly one to talk, considering that I had lusted after your dying body.
"Come back, Avon." Blake smiles. "I'll make you come back." Naked, he climbs onto the table and begins kissing and caressing the lump of live meat.
I drift closer. I just... I have to see. Blake. Blake is like a beacon of energy. Warmth. Life. He plays with the limp genitalia on the Avon-doll. Nothing happens to it, of course, but in my memories something stirs. I move closer still.
Blake's lips. They would be warm and generous on mine. I remember him sucking on a thumbtip or knuckle when deep in thought or contrarily, when relaxed and chatting idly, as sometimes happens even in the midst of rebellion.
Blake is larger than life. And quite well built. He strokes himself, and prepares the doll to accept him. Maybe we're both necrophiliacs. Or maybe it's just because it's us. I certainly had felt no desire towards Anna once I killed her, merely an overwhelming regret.
I'm not aware of moving, but the need to be closer to Blake draws me. I touch his back. He shudders, but accepts me. I sink into him and for a moment I am him. I see myself as he sees me, feel his desperation and loneliness, grief and guilt and dawning hope, as if it were my own.
And then we shout and orgasm and I leave his body in a jet of hot life, entering the new home my lover has prepared for me.
"Avon?"
I open my eyes and smile up at Blake, at the half hopeful, half uncertain look he gives me. "Now that I'm back, shall we do that again?"
And Blake laughs.