Their sabers flashed, and the lightning did too.
Corvo's arms buckled.
The blade didn't fall.
The blade didn't fall.
The swoop-racer opened eyes he hadn't realized he'd closed. He stared up, blinking back torrential rain that plastered his slick hair to scalp and face, and saw the powerful stranger staring back.
"What? You're not going to kill me? Finish it! Go on! End this horrible existence! If you can." His lips twisted in a sneer, a smirk, neither. "Or are you too weak? Because I'm not. I'm going to kill you."
Still the green-skinned man just looked at him, stared, gaze level and body still. Just watching. Waiting. Corvo hated him all of a sudden.
"What?" he questioned. And then, screamed, "WHAT?!"
Rage roiled in his chest, in his stomach and guts, melting soft tissue and boiling bone. He fisted both hands in the anger and dove in, screaming, screaming as he ripped back onto his feet and stabbed at his opponent.
The Mirialan twisted away from the furious blow like a fish in a stream. Corvo lashed out, nearly blind with burning wrath, every strike holding the strength of two. Again Ruka stepped back, and again Corvo struck, but this time the Mirialan's saber actually swept up to parry, nearly not in time. Brief alarm flashed over tattooed features before they refocused, and he started fighting back in turn, an unrelenting series of swings matched blow for blow against Corvo's onslaught.
Two-handed, Corvo smashed his saber against the Mirialan's, again and again, beating against it, a precise machete to thick brush. He screamed again, attacks growing wilder in his rage, and slammed his weapon into his opponent's. The lightsaber flew from Ruka's hands with tremors sent all up his gauntleted arms, making the Mirialan yelp.
But even as that other light winked out, skidding across the rocks, his empty hands came up in a heartbeat and something pushed.
Point-blank, the slow sledgehammer of pure power caught Corvo in the chest and threw him through the air, right off his feet. He was weightless, and then he hit the ground once, twice, rolling, each impact jarring his teeth in his gums and ringing through his skull and marrow. He hit something solid and stopped, breath gone out of him, gasping on the ground.
Bruising pain and exhaustion crashed over him all at once, his rage snuffed out just like his breath. The Corellian wheezed, cheek pressed into frigid stone where those same disgusting siren creatures surely scuttled. Over the thunder, he could just hear footsteps coming closer. He forced his blue eyes open, forced himself to scramble, to move, to survive. He'd always survived. His rage had let him and he had an infinite amount to spare and he needed to move.
But his body wouldn't respond to him, woozy from so much of the Dark Side running unchained and uncontrolled through it, sore from the throw. Something was probably broken. Boots stopped in front of him, lit by the blue glow of a recovered saber.
And again, the blade didn't fall.
Instead, gloved hands carefully lifted him up and gingerly moved his arms behind his back. He heard the snap of cuffs clicking into place, felt the electric current buzz briefly over his skin, familiar as anything.
Gasping in his first proper breath, Corvo loosed a whistle, sharp, high then low. Then he tried to struggle. The Mirialan snapped at him.
"Quit it already, ay. Hold still. You'll make it worse."
"What are you doing?" Corvo demanded, and oh, there was his anger again, anger for the indignity, for the games, for this nonsense. "What, you some bounty hunter? I've killed tons of you. I thought you idiots would get the message the last time I sent a guy back without any arms. I'll do the same thing to you. Arms and legs."
"Hold still," was all Ruka repeated in a stern tone, as if this was boring or annoying him.
"You should be scared of me," insisted the Corellian, smirk creeping back up even as the Mirialan dragged him around to set his back against the curve of stone steps he'd slammed into and moved in front of him, pulling off his gloves. A ring caught the light. Lots of scars. Ink. The same little calluses that Corvo had on his fingers, distinctly from plucking strings. We have a lot in common, the man had said.
Like hell, Corvo thought.
Ruka dug into one belt pouch and pulled out a little kit, drawing a tube with an injector out. He placed it to Corvo's neck, and before the Human could flinch away, expecting spice or a tranquilizer, he felt a brief sting of a needle and then the cool flush of bacta, of all things. Relief coursed in his flesh, and coals simmered in his soul.
"What. Are. You. Doing?" he tried again, and his words were nearly gravelly for their growl.
"I told you already, we have things in common, I think. You're angry. It's killing you. And it's— there's a girl. She's dead. And I think she was important to you. I think you might've been taking care of her, and now you're just— lost or some frang."
Corvo stiffened along every single muscle. His mind flashed to his little sister's corpse. He heard a high-pitched whine, felt white-blank rage.
"What," was all that he managed to hiss, because there was too much to ask.
"I get visions," the Mirialan explained. "I know you better than you think."
"You don't know me at all!" sneered the Knight.
"I've seen it."
"You haven't seen anything!"
Ruka closed his eyes. Sighed. Stood up.
"But I have."
And then because he was obviously an idiot, he kept talking.
"I've been seeing storms. It's why I came to Ahch-To."
There is rain in the dreams.
At first it seems innocuous, save for the fact that he knows. He can feel it by now, recognize it, when his dreams aren't from his own sleeping imagination but woven from shadow threads with needles of light. He meditates. He waits.
There are waves in the dreams. Waves and thunder. They crash and crash and the rain falls between them, dark to dark, a free fall, violence. The ocean — he thinks it is an ocean — is not peaceful. It is black and it swallows him up whenever the tide rises.
He is so sick of dreaming of blood in the water. Celeste City's ransacking had been bad enough. He is done having to experience drowning, over and over and over, sharp pressure-pain in his lungs and the sheer helplessness and panic of suffocation. But the visions don't exactly care what he's sick of, and he knows it is important, and so he pays attention when the flood fills his mouth and his tears dissipate into the churn.
"And I see you. Or, like, something like you. The visions are never that clear, but with enough of them and focus I can piece enough together, follow my senses. Takes me weeks. Months even. I don't really control it."
There's a man. He stands over the waves, then in them. Ruka tries to reach for him, his first instinct to pull free a drowning body, but as soon as his hand comes close, it's like he just grabbed on to the wrong end of a knife. It cuts, and he yells, clutching his hand to his chest as digits fall free. The man is all edges, and they flash in the lightning, rainwater on metal.
There is a girl's body in the dreams. The edge-man stands over it. He seems to weep, only then to rage. His anger is the water: the rain, the ocean, the thunder and lightning. It's everywhere, and it drowns them both.
Ruka keeps waking up gasping.
"I think the Force wants me to help you. It's had me do that before, other people, other times. You're not the first person I've dreamed of. Especially not the first with power like ours. I don't wanna fight you, and I'm not here to kriffing kill you." He gestured at the prone teenager to indicate the stuncuffs. He's barely a kid, dammit. He's a kid. Why's he gotta have some destiny, huh? he wanted to ask Bogan and Ashla. But he knew better than to expect answers from the Force. It didn't control them, but it certainly played a part. "The cuffs are just 'cause you went for your saber two seconds in. If you don't try to hurt me, I'll let you out."
That actually got a laugh out of Corvo, high and barking and a little manic in the way that Ruka had learned meant trouble.
"Arms and legs," the young Human hissed again, and then whistled in a weirder pattern than the last, and the Sith's instincts screamed in warning.
The Mirialan whirled around and up into a crouch, knowing the danger was going to come from behind him. He raised his saber to block, to swing, but even as he turned his eyes tracked motion, saw something low, not high — too low, short. Child his brain thought, and that instantaneous association was all it took to make his arms jerk, to lower his guard, a single spark between synapses of ingrained parental instinct.
It was enough of a stumble that the thing coming at him from below his hips could jump up and latch on.
Ruka screamed as pressure and pain lanced up his arm, sharp hot points and then crushing force like a vice. He tried to shake it off automatically and couldn't, as the tusk-like fangs only sank deeper, dragged wider by body weight and gravity. The damn horror of a hound growled while it held on, savaging, before the Mirialan had enough sense in his panic to drop to the ground and start hitting at the thing while inhaling the Force for strength. The beast released him with a yelp of pain when his fist connected and skittered back while snapping its hinged jaws, buggy red eyes wheeling.
It lunged again. Ruka thrust his uninjured hand out and threw it back, gripping the mutt in a telekinetic hand and flinging it into the nearest rock wall hard enough to make something crack-crunch. The hound whined, tried to get back up, fell back down when a leg went out under it.
Panting, the Sith turned back towards where he'd left the teenager, but the only thing sitting there were the damned stuncuffs, slick with rain.
Of kriffing course he can pick a lock, the Mirialan thought in agonized irritation, twisting around and scanning the area with narrowed eyes for any hint of the Human. His own blood was being washed rapidly away from the rocks. The water churned, and lightning flashed. The hound was nursing its wounds and growling a bass all the while. The slick stone provided no obvious footsteps, nothing. His arm throbbed, and Ruka wanted to scream.
He turned back around, caught a glimpse of shine off a bulky blaster and dark leather, and felt something crawl like ants burrowing under his skin over the tops of his shoulders and the back of his neck, dripping down his spine. He stiffened as he summoned his lightsaber back to hand with a thought and a flick of his eyes. Where was the danger? It hadn't felt like a typical warning in the Force, but...
His stomach clenched, and his throat closed. His eyes wheeled as fear rose up in his chest slow-creeping to choke him. What was happening?
"You really should be scared of me," Corvo called out from his position up on a higher jut of rock. He smiled cruel, anger lighting his eyes, expression twisted. "I'll show you."
