#'where's the dreamweaver' no idea! long dead maybe! maybe one of the three little pigs!

[words-writ-in-starlight]

Tori as Cinders and Jame as Briar Rose. That, thats a great concept. Tori chasing after his sister for thirty years (unlike canon) just gets me.

RIGHT????

Okay, so, some other thoughts I’ve thunk about this.  Obviously I would call it “oh my love (as the cities you were razing)” because that line fucks.

Obviously Tori is both Cinders and Snow/General White--he blames himself for not saving Jame (as all versions of Tori must) and so on his mission to find her, he starts rallying the resistance.  He assumes Jame is dead, at first, while he and Burr and Rowan and Harn and Rose and a couple others escape on a sabotaged ship.  Rose bleeds out from her wounds while she’s pumping oxygen, but with one less person burdening the system means they live to make landfall.  They go into hiding briefly, but then...

Then the Banes start turning out, in huge numbers, slim and lethal soldiers with clawed hands and silver eyes, and black curls shorn down to their scalps.  Tori understands the very first time he sees one, looks into his sister’s eyes, his eyes, and doesn’t see a goddamn thing looking back.  The Bane hesitates, though--not a flinch, just.  An extra moment in raising its arm to shoot him.  Tori shuts his eyes and puts a bullet through its heart, and rips off his glove without thinking, to see the ring on his hand.  Its stone is as white as snow, and he breathes, and breathes, and breathes, and then he reloads his gun and starts shooting Banes.

They are not Jame.  They are not.  He repeats the words until he can shoot them with his eyes open, looking into those silver eyes as they go dim and still.

(Jame, dreaming, sees her own hand rise, holding a gun, pointed at the other half of her soul, and screams no, helpless in the grip of a nightmare, one of the thousands upon thousands of nightmares she sees in fragments, and the hand--hesitates.  And then Tori shoots her--it--them--and she’s gone, snatched away to the infinite mind of a Behemoth, rolling across a planet like a storm front.)

(Her body, the real one, frowns faintly in her glass coffin.)

Tori leads from the front, as General Black.  This is why it’s rather important that he wears all black, you see--the Banes are armored in steel grey with the red crest of the Master for an accent, and an apology wouldn’t bring their general back, if you shot him by accident.  He ignores the way his own people flinch, if he comes up on them too suddenly.  He’s not here to be their friend.  He’s here to be their fixed point, the star they all navigate by, and to follow his ring as it slowly, so slowly, tints darker with each inch the resistance creeps toward the heart of the Master’s power.

Torisen wears his ring on a chain around his neck, after the first time it’s nearly lost in a fight.  He can hide it, that way.  Not everyone is eager to know that their general is seeking the woman they’ve been killing all these years.

(The Banes don’t flinch from him, not quite.  It’s not enough to be noticed as anything more than good luck on his part.  But Tori doesn’t often get shot, either.)

Grimly goes by the name Red Hood and brands his virus the WOLF, and Gorbel and Lyra overthrow their planet’s Snow King and pick his Mirror chips out of their skulls to give the resistance a home base, and the fearless general Aerulan and her wife and guardian, nicknamed Brenwyr the Beast, become known for their gift for evacuating planets before the Master’s forces can hit.  Kindrie, the best healer in the resistance, always knows when someone is going to die, and he’s given the nickname Godfather Death for his talents and his bone-white hair.

The anthem of the resistance is written about Pereden, who slew a Bane Behemoth--except, of course, that he didn’t.  He ordered his people to fall back and then he was never seen again, and Tori didn’t argue when the resistance hailed him as a hero, dead of his wounds.  He needed the support of Pereden’s father, Ardeth, commonly called the Cat.  He kills Pereden quietly for his treason, orders Harn and Burr to burn the body in secret, and bites back the guilt when he replaces Pereden in Ardeth’s affections, as the new Marquis de Carabas.  The resistance needs the money.

(The boy who really did kill the Behemoth died without anyone seeing him, in that same battle, after he brought down the Behemoth through pure dumb luck.  A child, too young for war, really, mourned by only Torisen and his closest advisors, those who knew the truth of Pereden’s treason.  The only witness to Donkerri’s death is the Bane who kills him, and the sleeping soldier watching through its silver eyes.)

The first Bane, the Bane that went wrong and got wired into the Master’s defense grid, is also the Bane whose mind has touched Jame’s the most, in the thirty years of their dreaming.  She knows him inside out, knows that there’s a whole person in there, knows that he’s full of broken glass and hate and the need to kill.  He has some of her memories, some of his own.  She presses the face of her brother, their brother, Torisen, the other half of her soul, into his mind whenever she can, tells him I love him, lived for him, would die for him, protect him.  The Shadow Bane, as he’s been nicknamed by the resistance, coughs out stasis fluid on his knees as Tori’s soldiers pull wires and tubes from the ports on his spine, and then grins, through drenched black hair.

It’s Jame’s face, but she could never wear a smile like that, Tori thinks.  It’s been thirty years since he could feel sick, but he feels the memory of it as the Shadow Bane rises to its--his?--feet.

“So,” he says, standing on shaking legs and ripping the last of the wires away with his own hands.  “You’re the one she loves.”

“Sir?” Burr asks, casting a glance at Tori, as if to ask if they should, maybe, have just shot him.

The Shadow Bane steps forward, wavering, and his starved frame looks nothing like Jame, doesn’t even have her claws, but he has her bright silver eyes and Tori stands his ground.  One of the damp fingers raps him on the chest, where the scarlet glow of Tori’s ring can be seen through his shirt, and the Bane’s voice is low and rasping from disuse, utterly unfamiliar, but the laugh is still bright and cruel when he says, “You’re closer than you think, brother.”

“Take me to her,” Tori says, keeping his voice carefully even.

“She says it’s my choice,” the Bane drawls, tracing his hand up to Tori’s throat, as if considering trying to crush it in his hands.  Tori thinks he might be able to stop him, depending on how much of Jame’s strength is in those fragile-looking hands.

Then the Bane moves, lightning-quick, and Tori remembers that this was their first attempt, known for instability, who wiped out a moon, and then--

The kiss draws blood, maybe his, maybe the Bane’s, spilling iron and salt across his tongue, and their lips are both stained red with it, when the Bane pulls away, a feral light in his silver eyes.

“A blood price, then, for our sister,” the Bane says, bright and mad.

The Bane, mad and cruel and as dangerous to his allies as his enemies, lives three days in freedom, before he dies to save Jame, newly released from her glass prison, so that she can kill the Master.  Jame kneels over Torisen, holding his bloodied chest together as she shouts for the resistance, shouts for a medic, and gives the Bane a nod of gratitude as the light goes out of his silver eyes.  

It’s only her long hair, falling almost to her waist, that saves her from being shot on sight, when Kindrie and the survivors of Tori’s original seven storm into the throne room.

“Who are you?” Kindrie demands, holding up a hand.

“I’m--” Jame’s voice fails her, looking at the Banes dead around them, the one in black, the many in silver and red, her hands covered in gore with her ring ablaze on her finger, and then she says, “I’m Tori’s sister.  He needs help.”

Kindrie presses his lips together, hesitates, and then says, “Arrest her.  I’ll see to the General.”

Jame is still in chains, sitting at Tori’s bedside, when he finally wakes up nearly two weeks later.  No one can look at her.  Only a few can bear to speak to her.  Tori reaches blindly for a gun, when he comes around, and then he blinks and sees the long black hair bound back into a braid, the shackles around the slender wrists, and he says, “Don’t tell me they chained you up.”

“I’m afraid so,” Jame says with a wet laugh, and she shakes her wrists to make her chains clink.  “Hello, brother.”