Bear's Beauties: Existential Crisis 17 (Patreon)

[center]<<Lana Beniko>>[/center]

“Lana? Can I talk to you in private please?” Lisa asked, pulling me from my conversation with Mr. Black.

Glancing at the man, he just gave a smile and a nod before walking away. I had a very strong suspicion what Lisa wished to discuss, but I’d honestly been expecting this conversation much sooner.

“What is it, Lisa?” I asked. We were alone in the library, Hyacinth and her friends having left not long ago.

“Why’d you do it? The plan was to have me kill the cart operator. But you did it before I could. Why?” Lisa’s eyes bored into my own, burning with an intensity that was out of place on the normally calculating girl’s face.

“Because it’s not the role you are suited for,” I answered, leading her over to a table with a pair of chairs.

Lisa took the offered chair, and waited for me to sit down before responding, “I was a Warlord, I can handle a bit of killing.”

“How many people have you, personally, killed? I suspect the answer is very, very low. Lisa, in you I see something I saw when I was the head of Sith Intelligence: someone trying to be a lethal Cipher Agent but not suited to the role. Do you know what I did with those people?”

“Kill them for failing?”

“That would be a waste of resources. No, I put them in a different role. If we were in the Empire, you would be a poor Cipher. But I have no doubts that you would be one of the best Watcher agents in the entire galaxy, Empire or Republic. Letting you kill that goblin would have hurt you, emotionally. It would have hurt your ability to focus, to do what you needed to do at a given time, and everyone would have suffered the consequences.”

Lisa just stared at me, not saying anything. Her eyes roamed over my face, looking for some sign of… something. I could have looked into her mind to see what she was looking for, but I stayed out. For something like this, there was no reason to invade her privacy like that. Not for something so mundane.

“I…” Lisa began, before pausing. She swallowed, opened her mouth to try again, but no words came out. Her hands on the table were shaking lightly, so I took them in my own. I didn’t speak, letting her have the time she needed to find the words to convey what she was feeling.

Finally, after nearly five minutes of trying to contain her emotions, Lisa took a shuddering breath to steel herself and spoke, “You know how we get powers from our world, right?”

“You go through some personalized, traumatic event, correct?” I asked, no one had said as much, but I’d managed to piece together that much from the clues that had been dropped over the last month.

“Yeah. For me, it was my brother committing suicide. Or rather, the fact that I didn’t see the warning signs. I have the realization that if I’d just seen the fact that my brother wanted to die I could have helped him, then the next thing I know I start learning everything about people just by looking at them.”

I could tell Lisa wasn’t finished, but my heart went out to her. Even if this was the first time Lisa had ever mentioned her brother, I could still hear the pain from unhealed wounds.

“Oh but it gets even better. My parents… their reaction to their son having hanged himself and their daughter being so traumatized she gained powers was to immediately start looking for ways to exploit said daughter’s powers. Then I was told I’d be working for a psychopath with a superiority and control complex that I’d be working for him or I’d have a lead lobotomy. I… I don’t…”

Lisa took another shuddering breath and blinked away the tears that were starting for form, “I can handle pity and condescension. You didn’t do it for either of those, you did it because you care. I don’t know how to deal with that.”

I didn’t respond with words. I stood up from the chair and pulled the emotionally shaken girl into a hug. As the shorter girl buried her face into my shoulder and sobbed the emotions out, her long maintained barriers crumbling for a time, my mind was sent back to a time years ago. Before my love and I were brought into this Family. Before I was founding an Alliance that turned into an Empire. Before the death of Darth Marr and disappearance of Darth Nox. Before Ziost, back to a quiet tent of Yavin IV.

When Nikhol Diomedes, Darth Nox of the Dark Council, Mistress of the Dead, shared her history with me. When she told me about her time as a slave on Ziost. Of the conditions on the plantation she’d been raised on, the times she saw her fellow slaves fed to the beasts when her masters were in particularly foul moods. Of how for the first time she felt like someone accepted her past without disdain or sickening compassion. Just simple acceptance.

Just like that night, I stood there, offering to be strong so Lisa could for once allow herself a chance to be weak. An opportunity to let herself bend before she broke.

[center]<<Bear Sandosen>>[/center]

“Oh, Bear, can we have a talk?” Kara’s normally silky smooth voice was just the right sort of tone that every man knew. The one that all but screamed ‘you fucked up royally, you stupid man!’

Turning around from going over resource reports with Cameron, my words caught in my throat as I took in Kara’s expression. Her eyes were glowing red, she was floating three feet off the ground, and her face showed all the fury she’d kept out of her voice. Despite myself, my gaze immediately went to her fingers before I reminded myself that Atrocitus hadn’t created the Red Lantern Battery, Kara wasn’t going to be killing me with plasma blood/vomit.

“Is this about the endeavor to capture the final horcrux?” Cameron asked, drawing both my and Kara’s focus.

“Of course that’s what it’s about!” Kara shouted, her eyes glowing brighter before she closed them and took a deep breath.

“I understand you’re upset,” I began, foolishly drawing the angry kryptonian’s attention. “But what we’d learned on our initial scouting run meant that what would follow we didn’t think you’d be able to let slide. If we let Kragnus live, it would become immediately apparent what was stolen and who was responsible. That’s without touching on the fact that despite being from another planet, you have more in common with humans than goblins do.”

“Genetic viability of human/kryptonian offspring is 87.4573% while genetic viability of human/goblin offspring is 11.6219%,” Cameron so helpf… wait, what?

Turning to Cameron I asked, “What about Professor Flitwick? I thought he was half goblin.”

“I inquired about his non-human heritage, and he informed me that his family has relied heavily on fertility enhancing potions and rituals in order to conceive. Without them his family are functionally sterile. He himself chose to become an instructor when he discovered that even with his family’s fertility enhancers his sperm was incapable of fertilizing ovum except those of a direct family member or other human/goblin hybrids. To his knowledge, no such hybrids outside of himself are currently alive.”

I blinked in surprise. So, Flitwick became a Professor because that was the closest he’d come to being a parent? That’s… just, damn. Kara shook her head, before returning to glaring at me, but it wasn’t as intense as before.

“No sidetracking, unintentional it might have been. You’re not getting off the hook that easily,” she said, crossing her arms under her chest.

“Okay,” I easily agreed, motioning to an empty chair. “Shall we go over precisely what’s angering you the most and how we’ll address it?”

Now it was Kara’s turn to blink, before she floated over to the chair, “I’ll be honest, I was expecting you to argue more.”

“I’ve lived over fifty years, Kara,” I pointed out, because fuck chronology, this body was not in its fifties anymore. “I’ve seen a lot in that time and while none of it compares to losing everything, even my homeworld, it still results in some maturity.”

Kara sat down, and as she did, I asked, “Is it that we killed some of the goblins or that we excluded you that’s pissing you off the most?”

I already knew what the answer was, but I figured I’d ask anywa…

“It’s being treated as an outsider.”

For a second time in this conversation I was thrown off mental balance. I… okay, think, in the comics featuring Kara’d always emphasized no killing. But… oh. It dawned on me like being hit in the face with a Louisville slugger.

Sighing, I ran my hands through my hair, “First, let me apologize. I let myself fall into the trap of thinking in the context of the comics I grew up reading, not you as a real person. I’m sorry.”

Kara continued to stare me down, before she glanced over at Cameron and spoke, “I get that there’s certain things that I’m not going to be told, you have a number of different things you need to do to prepare and I do understand the concept of operational security. I get that there’s certain ‘jobs’ that I’m not going to be suited for. What’s ‘pissing me off’ is that even without that, you guys aren’t including me.

“I’ve felt like an outsider ever since I got on Earth. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I wanted to die when Krypton exploded, and Kal’s been doing his best. But…” Kara trailed off, trying to find the right words to express what she was trying to say.

“You are Kryptonian in culture, not just physiology,” Cameron stated, and I felt like hitting myself over the head for not realizing it sooner.

“Yes, I’m from Argo City, not Smallville. There were no local sports, no innocent barn dances, or religious festivals. We knew that we were living out an extended death sentence, no matter how hard our parents tried to hide it from the rest of us. In the end, I find out that a member of my family survived on a planet with a yellow star, but he and I are the only members of our species left. Even then, I’m the last to remember Krypton’s culture, so no matter where I go, I’ll always be apart from everyone else.”

“Alright, again, I apologize for excluding you. I swear it wasn’t intentional, and I’ll do my best to consciously stop doing so if it isn’t for, like you said earlier, operational security. How about we start now?” I asked.

Kara raised an eyebrow, “What did you have in mind?”

“Well, no offense but I don’t think it’s a good idea to dig out the Resurrection Stone so you can talk to your folks and lovers from Argo City again. Plus we’d have to pry it from Nikhol and I don’t want her to go all Mad Scientist on me for interrupting her research in figuring out how it works… and now I can’t get the image of her with a hunchbacked assistant named Igor out of my head.”

Kara chuckled in amusement, “Isn’t it pronounced ‘Eye-gor’?”

I couldn’t help the snort that escaped from me at that, before getting myself under control, “Anyway, I was actually thinking we could have another movie night. Not necessarily with everyone, but it would be a good opportunity to relax while we’re waiting for things to reach a point where we can move forwards.”

Kara thought for a moment, before giving a nod, “Got anything in particular in mind?”

“I have a few.”

[hr][/hr]

A few hours later Kara, Cameron, Harley, Tonks, and myself were on the Yamato taking advantage of the “home” theater set up for a comedy movie marathon. I’d suggested each of us picking a different movie, and though Kara passed on picking a movie herself the rest agreed. Having the remote on hand I immediately set up Clue as the first movie.

Tonks used magic to summon the remote to her moments before I was tackled by Harley. She queued Spaceballs and tossed the remote to Cameron just in time to receive a tackle from an excitable blonde missile herself. Cameron was kind enough to let Harley go third as I got the popcorn ready.

“I’m a touch concerned that the movie has ‘zombie’ in the title,” Kara hesitantly said as I turned around just in time to see the logo for Zombieland.

“Don’t worry, by the time that movie was released, the zombie genre had diversified enough to include comedies,” I said as I carried some buckets of popcorn over and started handing them out.

Cameron picked Down Periscope as the final movie just as I sat down with my own bucket of popcorn. Settling down into my seat, I tossed a few kernels into my mouth as the lights dimmed and one of the funniest movies in history began.