(Author's Note: a leap forward in time from Equivalent Exchange. We'll get there eventually, depending how things play out, but as so often happens this wanted out tonight.)

end of the line

On the day he breaks her heart they have been married for half a year, plus five days.

Nine likes to imagine in the days that follow that the extra week was deliberate, that Theron wouldn't have been so cruel as to choose a date with so much meaning for both of them-

Well. It meant a great deal to her. She isn't sure what it means to him any more, and it's stupid of her, really, to parse it in degrees of cruelty. Like he didn't mean to hurt her.

You won't feel a thing.

She wishes that had been true. A knife in her heart would have hurt less than this.

He hadn't been himself for months, but she'd assumed at first it was because of Jace.

Force knows Theron and his father hadn't been close, not for a long time- she remembers that awful fight, when Theron had gone to Coruscant; later on they'd sent him an invitation to the wedding but he never replied, not even to send regrets- but when Jace died on Iokath any hope of reconciliation went to the pyre with him. Satele had vanished again, too, gone without a trace. (He tried to call her: you have to, she'd said, you have to tell her; I'm sure she already knows, he'd replied, but did it anyway because she'd asked. Satele didn't answer the first time, or the second, or the tenth.) It was the two of them together against everything, just as it always was, but something had changed.

On the nights when she'd wake to find him out of bed, sitting on the couch and staring, silent, into the dark of their quarters, she would slip in behind him and wrap her arms around his shoulders, pull him back against her body; they would sit there, her fingers stroking slow along his arms, his face, until he closed his eyes and finally slept.

I'm sorry. I never meant for him to-

I know, he'd murmur against her chest. I know.

Was it ever enough, what they had? She'd thought so once. She'd thought-

(She doesn't want to think about him anymore.

She can't not think about him.)

It's funny when she thinks about it.

(It isn't funny.)

Theron seemed more like himself that morning than he had in a long time. When she woke he was still beside her, his breath steady on her neck, and she turned in his arms to kiss him awake; he opened his eyes and pulled her close, covered her mouth with his and her body with his, laced his fingers through hers in the way he knew she always liked, when he was above her-

Good morning to you, too, she'd grinned when they finished, and they lay together, breathless, amid the rumpled sheets.

He'd looked down at her, kissed her forehead. I love you. You know that, right?

I know, she'd said. I love you, too.

(It wasn't a lie. It wasn't. It wasn't, it can't have been, she would have seen it, would have known-

Theron, why?)

Umbara.

It was everything she hated about the Republic wrapped in a layer of darkness, a veneer of respectability covering over a culture built on machinations and murder, vicious as the worst Sith. What would the Republic possibly want with so many Adegan crystals? She thinks she knows.

Iokath should have been enough of a lesson for all of them. Jace spoke of the superweapon with a gleam in his eye, like a child dreaming of a new toy; he died for wanting it and she'd nearly died trying to stop it.

It never ends, does it?

For all the lies that he told her, perhaps Theron was right about that after all.

"Ever since you defeated Valkorion, everything I've done has been towards one goal... the total destruction of the Eternal Alliance."

She reels just as surely as if he'd slapped her. "You don't mean that. After everything we accomplished together, all the work we put into the Alliance-"

"I do." Theron folds his arms across his chest, a barrier between them as physical as the forcefield glowing red across the doorway. "I had so much hope- but it turned out just like the Republic, rotting from the inside out, and you've become a symbol of oppression. So much for your dreams of peace."

No. No, no-

Her voice trembles, her tongue tripping over the words, one hand pressed to Lana's throat- still breathing, get up, Lana, come on. "We promised each other no more secrets. Why didn't you tell me if you were so unhappy? We could have changed things. We still can."

"I believed that, once." He shakes his head, turning away. "But it's too late now. I can't stop what's already happening."

"Damn it, look at me!" This can't be real. This can't possibly be real. She must be dreaming. Wake up. Wake up. "Even if I fall here that doesn't solve anything. If you topple the Alliance, millions of people are going to die."

The train's starting to break apart now, so close to the end of the line, and it's hard to hear him. "If that's the cost of peace, so be it."

She couldn't have thought of something that sounded less like him. "Then answer something for me before you kill me, Theron. You owe me that much."

Was it her imagination, or did he flinch?

"You said everything you've done since Valkorion's defeat has been leading to this. Did that include marrying me?"

He doesn't answer.

"Tell me!"

"I love you," he says. "You know that. But this is bigger than us." She stumbles as the train rocks, and when she's steady enough to look up again he's moving toward the door. "Thirty seconds to impact. Goodbye, Nyr- Commander."

(A fragment of her name, a slip of the tongue at the end of the line.

He was the only one who she ever let call her by her name.

He is the only one who she ever will.)

She almost just doesn't move, almost lets herself stay and be blown apart in the impact- maybe that'll be what it takes to finally wake her up. (Is it true that if one dies in one's dreams, one dies in the waking world? She's never been brave enough to find out.) But Lana's staggering on her feet, shouting in her ear over the metal-on-metal screaming of the train and maybe this isn't a nightmare after all. If it's real-

oh, Theron-

She jumps into flame and darkness.

She might have been offended, once, that he thought a train crash would have been enough to end her. He should have killed her while she slept. It would have been a surer thing.

But her grief is keener than her anger, sharper than her pain, surpassing anything else she might have felt- her left wrist is broken and she only knows it by the harsh alarming of the medscanner, her body bruised and her skin blistered and her eyes swollen with unshed tears.

(Open a channel for wide broadcast, she tells Lana as soon as she can speak again, before you start the search. I want to send Theron a message.

Are you sure? You- she can feel her eyes flick over her face as Lana chooses her words with extraordinary caution-you should rest. It can wait until morning, if-

She runs her tongue over her bottom lip, tasting blood. No. I want him to see what he did.)

She cuts off her hair in the medical bay on the Gravestone ; there's no saving it, not like after the carbonite when she was careful and with time it recovered from its brittle delicacy. This time it crumbles into ash in her hands when she lets it down. (There is a metaphor there, probably, but she's too tired to think about it. He always loved her hair). Trauma shears serve well enough for now, and she crops it short around her ears until she barely recognizes the face looking back at her in the mirror.

When she comes out of kolto for the first time afterward the shears are gone, along with her knives and her rifle and all her poisons and, from the room they'd shared, Theron's duffel bag.

She doesn't ask Lana where she put them.

It's better if she doesn't know.

After the first day someone moves a kolto bath into her quarters. That, at least, is a mercy. She doesn't have to see the rest of the crew looking at her, every damn person on this whole fucking ship, with pity in their eyes. She wants to scream at them. She wants to howl her loss until her lungs give out.

I never asked for this, but I never got a choice. I never wanted any of this, never wanted the power or the title or the fleets, never wanted the Emperor inside my head, never wanted another war. I wanted one thing, only one, and now he's gone-

But she doesn't. She sits silent in her quarters, turning her wedding band around and around on her finger, until Lana brings her in a plate of food.

The morning's plate sits untouched on the table in front of her- has she moved since morning? She can't remember. When Lana bends to set down the one she's holding, she sees it too.

"Commander?"

She looks up. "I don't want to hear that title ever again."

"Nine." Lana sighs. "When's the last time you ate anything?"

She shrugs. It's a good question. Kolto's technically nutritive and the portable tub wouldn't stop beeping until she'd spent the full six hours submerged in it last night, so- "Does it matter?"

Another sigh. "I know you're-"

"You don't." She focuses back on the movement of her hands, the glint of the stones in the near-dark. "You don't know. Get out."

"I'm sorry," Lana says after a moment. "I'm sorry that I failed you. I should have-"

Folding tighter in on herself- she can't tuck her legs up against her chest, not with her arm still in a sling, so she slumps sideways against the pillows- she shakes her head. "It wouldn't have mattered. You could have shown me every detail of his plan and I'd never have believed it."

"And Theron knew that."

Even hearing his name hurts, punching through the haze of the painkillers. "Of course he did. I loved-" (Past tense; the word sits in her mouth, dry as ashes on her tongue. Lying is in their blood, hers and Theron's both, but there are lies and there are Lies. That is one of the latter, and she has had enough of those now to last a lifetime.) "I love him." She shuts her eyes. "Even now. And I thought he loved me. Stars, I'm such an idiot."

The couch shifts beneath her; when she opens her eyes again Lana's seated, carefully avoiding touching her, at the edge of the cushion. "You're not."

"He wants me dead, if you hadn't noticed. Maybe that passes for love among Sith, but-"

"He loves you," Lana says quietly. "I don't pretend to know what he's thinking right now, but I can promise you that he loves you."

"Don't say that. He lied to me for months- years, maybe- he lied to my face-" her voice quavers. "He let me sit down in that chair on Iokath knowing it might kill me and then he kissed the burns when he changed my bandages. He- I-"

Hands balled into fists, she wants to hurt something so badly- but there's no one here but Lana, hollow-eyed and pale beside her, and when, forgetful of her injuries, she lifts her hands to rub at her face, the sling tugs at her neck and a spike of anguish up her broken arm makes her whimper. She curls onto her side.

"I used to tease him," she whispers into the pillow as Lana reaches toward her, one hand gentle against her back, "that I never knew how he managed all those years in the field. Even undercover, I could always look at him and tell exactly what he was thinking." Her vision blurs, tears welling up despite herself; she shakes her head, trying to blink them away. "Now I know."

She won't cry, she won't-

Her body is a traitor, too.

[That night she dreams of Hunter.

He stands over her- always he in her dreams, though she knows better in waking hours- flipping a vibroscalpel in one hand, up and down, up and down, blade glinting in the light of the swaying fluorescent lamp above them.

Well, Hunter says, I suppose we'd better get started. Hold out your hand.

She doesn't.

Onomatophobia. Hold out your hand.

When she lifts her hand he presses the handle of the scalpel into it, folds her fingers closed. Raising her head, she shivers; the metal table beneath her's cold against her back, straps pinning her left arm and tight across the width of her thighs, dark ink-lines on her skin tracing the lines of her collarbones, meeting between her breasts and then running lower, down along the saber scar and the flat expanse of her belly. A plastic tag, blank, circles one toe.

Oh.

I'm not dead, you know. Aren't we getting ahead of ourselves?

You are, he says. It just hasn't sunk in yet. Don't worry. You won't feel a thing.

His voice is-

She can still turn her head and when she looks Hunter's face flickers, passing through a hundred permutations until it settles, finally, on one she knows as well as her own.

Onomatophobia. Theron bends down to kiss her forehead, his hands stroking her shorn hair, before he lifts her arm across her chest and lays the blade against her skin. We'll begin, he says, with the heart.

He lied. It hurts. It hurts so much, and-]

She wakes up screaming.

Lana finds her a minute later, sitting in the 'fresher beneath the running water, scrubbing invisible ink-lines from her body.

"I've diverted as many of our field operatives as I can," Lana says, holding the datapad out toward her, "to looking for him. If we find Theron-"

"When." There's no room here for if. The only question she knows how to ask now is why.

"-when we find Theron, how would you like them to proceed?"

She reaches out toward it, scrawling her orders with one fingertip across the screen.

observe and report only
all intel to be transmitted directly to Alliance Command
DO NOT ENGAGE

(Despite everything he's done, the only person she will let hurt him is her.)

The day before they return to Odessen, he sends her a message.

She almost deletes it. Whatever he has to say, part of her doesn't want to hear it. Part of her doesn't want to hear anything he has to say ever again.

Only a small part, though. Most of her needs to.

She opens it.

I saw your message on the Holonet, he writes. (Good. She imagines him watching it, wherever he is. Did it hurt, Theron?) I wish I could drop everything and leave with you, somewhere far from all this war and death. But that's only a dream- reality is much harder.

It sounds more like him than any single word he said on Umbara. She keeps reading, even as the words blur together on the screen, until she reaches the end.

I don't expect you to understand. However this ends, I need you to remember this: I loved you from the moment I saw you. I always will.

Another lie. A pretty lie, but a lie. How many times had they laughed about that moment? It was a good memory, bound up as it was with everything that happened afterward, all the way to Yavin and the scalding savage breathless want of those early days- but what they had wasn't love, then. Love came after.

He knew that, too. Why make it into something false? She doesn't understand.

(He doesn't expect her to, he says. So generous of him.)

It ends there; she throws her datapad onto the bed in frustration, pacing back and forth along the floor of her quarters. They'll be on Odessen soon enough. She'll have to make a speech; despite their best efforts the news has gotten out already. If people were already doubting her leadership- Force, they're going to lose allies over this.

She's all the way across the room when the datapad chimes.

Decryption complete.

That's odd. She runs decryption protocols on everything, ever since what happened to Keeper all those years ago, but Theron's message wasn't in any kind of code so far as she could tell. Unless-

Snatching it back up again, she scans through the message again, line by line. Nothing's different, though, all the text the same with nothing changed until she reaches the very end and there's a tiny fragment of an image embedded, hiding beneath-

Her hand shakes so violently that she drops the datapad.

Oh-