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Resolutions (Another Dream)

She was curled up on a cot in the slave's quarters, her body racked with sobs. A soft, gentle hand began to stroke her hair and she looked up into the face of the woman who had been her foster mother. Ladia. Long dead, Ladia, and yet...

"What troubles you, child?" she said in her sweet, softly accented voice.

It shifted then, to the arena, and Mirketh touching her, and then as fast as that to the enormous bed in the Imperial Palace, to Akai, bending to kiss her lips and drawing back at her expression, her tear-streaked face.

Both father figures of a sort, and Akai said:

"Oh, my love, you are troubled. Tell me."

She didn't have the answers, didn't have the words, so she just stared up at him, and it shifted again, became the pavilion in the desert, and the boy that called her mother.

"Put it in order, then," the boy said. "Find a way to order it and give it meaning."

"The colors," she said. "I remember the colors."

***

And suddenly, everything was green. It was forest and green sky above, and her hair was green, and her eyes were green and her long green gown was sliding up her thighs.

Green had been the first of them. Green, the color of physical love, of sex. The color of Caine, although she wasn't quite sure why she thought that - if someone had told her once, or if it only seemed so in her mind.

It was hot, suddenly, and there was a perfume in the air. And someone's mouth was pressed on hers, someone's tongue stole quietly into her mouth. And it was Mirketh, Akai, Z'Shar, Tobias, Zend, Blake... many many more, men and women, but these the ones who were important. These the ones who had meant something.

And then the lover drew back and Blake said, "Welcome to Gotterdammerung, darling. Welcome to the end days. They could not have done it without you. White to stain red."

"What does that mean?" said Jenever.

"Death, probably," said Zend. "But at least we will meet again, then, love."

"I am sorry. I understood too late," she tried to say, but he was already changing and it was Tobias who answered.

"You think you understand now? Oh, honey, I'd laugh... if it wasn't so accursed sad." He ran a hand through his hair. "So what is it that you understand?"

"Losing. I lost," she said simply. "They must have poisoned me, must have done something to me."

Tobias laughed, and then it was Z'Shar laughing. "You think that's better, your Radiance? You really think that one kind of weakness is preferable to another? You lost. It is just that simple."

"I guess," she struggled for another reason, any other reason, "Caine said I did not want to win."

"Because you love him?" It was Akai. "That never stopped you before."

"No... no... It's wrong, somehow... it's tainted."

Mirketh's twisted face - ugly-handsome, scarred, with those startling pale blue eyes, looking at down her. "You're lying," he said. "Lying to make yourself feel less a failure. You were only ever good for two things, Jenever: Killing men or pleasuring them. And now, there isn't even that."

***

It was blue for a moment, so quickly she couldn't make it out, and then it was white - blindingly white. She was lying on a cold marble slab in a sepulchre, her long white hair stretched out to vainly attempt to cover her snow white body.

Mirketh was still there, now in white, although it was blue, as a color, she gave to him. Blue, the color of evil in S'jaiteh. White was Julian's color, in her mind, the color of ice and death and false purity.

Both Julian and Mirketh were now dead. By her hand. She saw it for an instant - grasping Mirketh's hair and pulling the knife tight across his throat - the smooth, sickeningly sweet instant her sword slid into Julian's body...

And Mirketh said, "You're useless now, Jenever. Weak as that little girl I had to toughen up all those years ago."

"Toughen up?" she demanded. "That is what you call it? You are sick, Mirketh."

"No, you ignorant slut, I'm dead. You're sick. Insane, probably. And now you've lost the only thing that made you better than everyone else. You've lost everything."

His face changed, but his eyes did not, and he was the Hunter. The Hunter with ice-blue eyes, as she had never seen him. "Remarkably careless of you, woman, losing the way that you did."

"I got you, didn't I?" Jenever snarled.

"Perhaps. If so, I was tired and surprised. But Benedict - he was tired and rusty, and he had you dead to rights. Poor little girl."

She was almost crying again, rage bubbling inside her. "Don't you dare. Don't you dare pity me. You're just like him. He made me, so you'll take what you get. The woman of ice: Jenever."

***

Red, then, everything red, and this the last stop on the road of understanding, because red was blood and it had to end with blood. It was Jenever's dream, after all.

She stood in her rose red armor, crimson hair streaming in the wind, and she gazed upon a few of them: Blake, Seth, Tobias, Benedict. Her sword was in her hand, and it, too, was red.

"This is what I am," she said to them, pleading with them. "Fire and ice, together. No pity, no remorse, no hesitation."

"It is what you were," said Benedict. "This - this... is what you are."

The colors were right again, her armor gone, and there were scars all over her body - whip scars, sword scars, knife scars, burn scars... there were scars inside that no one could see.

"A woman who can lose... on purpose... because she has to," said Seth. "Because it's the only way we can all win."

Something tore free inside her, but she nodded. "It's a weakness," she said, "but I can live with it."

Blake smiled. "Welcome to Gotterdammerung, Guinevere."

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