fandomtownies | The Beach, Saturday Morning

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The Beach, Saturday Morning

Another slow, slow week had passed on by, irrelevant and tedious.

While River continued her operation on Artika, Kerrigan's forces had been trying to hunt down Zeratul, but the Protoss proved elusive, his path... troubling.

Yet again, Kerrigan hence made her way to the quietest part of the island, where there was the least chance of interference through the chattering thoughts of others. (Yesterday had been particularly annoying, with strains of song drifting in and out of her consciousness.) She took a deep breath, and looked to the skies, and listened.

By now, she didn't need to drop an inch of her disguise to do so: that was a good discovery. But the airwaves of the mind were quiet, and even the scratching-burning sound of the Dark Voice seemed more distant, and harder to grasp.

[[ open! ]]

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Roy had walked this route often when he had lived on the island, and perhaps it was nostalgia that led him to walk it that morning.

It was nostalgia as well to run into her, even as the way she had departed left him wary. "I heard that you have returned."

"Roy."

Kerrigan didn't have to turn around to know who he was; she'd known the moment he'd walked onto the beach.

"And I heard you left," she supplied.

"There were places I was needed more," he replied, the image of Central reduced to rubble passed through his mind and he quickly pushed it back.

"So did you clean up your mess?" he asked. "I seem to recall you creating a rather big one here before taking off."

"There wasn't much left to clean up," she replied, staring out over the water. Central passed into and out of her mind, but she discarded it as mostly inconsequential information. For now. "Lee's gone. Harriet's dead."

He didn't exactly what that meant, but the sense of foreboding he'd had back then came back to him.

"I doubt you expected it to still be the same," he replied with less sympathy than he would have had two years ago.

Kerrigan finally turned around, slowly, and met his eyes. Past-hurt-but-humbled, the inevitable play on being once lost, twice found: it came easily after a while spent back in Fandom. Possibly too easily - it made the zerg in her twitch. "No," she said. "I didn't. But I had at least a passing hope Harriet wouldn't die in a government coverup."

Bitter, she could also do, and even better.

"I hadn't hear that she had died," Roy replied with a grimace, but his features soon returned to that careful mask even as a part of him was searching her face for the friend he once had.

"There weren't a whole lot of reasons to stay in touch."

"No," Kerrigan agreed, rubbing at her arms. "Weren't any for me, either. Until recently." A short pause. "The Overmind's also dead."

He rather seemed to recall she had plenty of reasons, she had merely cut them off.

"Until recently?" he asked, while he tried to recall what she had told him of this Overmind.

Very little. She hadn't known much at the time she was even capable of saying anything.

"Until recently," Kerrigan repeated. She sighed. "Look, Roy, I know we parted on bad terms, but what I'm trying to say is that the thing that grabbed a hold of me back then is gone. You don't have to treat me with kid gloves, like I'm a rabid dog or something."

"You don't treat a rabid dog with kid gloves, you shoot it down," Roy pointed out. As far as he could see, he was doing neither.

"I'm being cautious, if you want to put a word to it. You weren't being straight when you left, and as far as I knew back then the decision was entirely your own. You can correct me if I'm wrong, but I only remember that you turned your back on those who would have helped you."

"It wasn't me," she said, and reached up, scrubbing at the side of her head. "The Zerg are run by a hive mind, or at least they were. The Overmind. I fought it off for months, but in the end, it got me."

Telepathic creates, he remembered now.

"You never said," he replied, his voice softer now. "And this Overmind is dead now? What happened to the Zerg then?"

"I didn't know what was happening until it did," Kerrigan said, her mouth curling up into a wry little smile. "Some of them went feral and wandered away. Some of them were strong enough to assert some power over themselves and the Zerg around them. And some of them were taken in by stronger Zerg, or the Earth human force that blew through Koprulu a while back. They put an end to those plans pretty quickly, though."

"And what happened to you?" Roy asked as she seemed to have left that out.

"I've always been one of the Overmind's experiments," she said, spitting out the word. "He left me some level of autonomy. His death didn't strike me as hard; it just gave me back my own free will."

Roy hummed quietly, processing her words. "What did you do with it?"

"Made sure River was safe. Came here."

Kerrigan pushed some hair back behind her ear. "Did my best to look human, as you can tell."

Roy nodded slowly. "So where's she? I didn't hear that she returned as well."

"Back in Koprulu," Kerrigan replied. "Safe. She doesn't belong here any more, she'd be... restless."

"I'm a bit surprised that you'd leave her there," Roy admitted. "What made you decide to come back?"

"She's safe," Kerrigan repeated. "That's all I'm saying about that. As for Fandom, well..."

She sighed.

"It's Fandom."

"It is," Roy agreed slowly. "Are you glad to be back here?"

"I didn't have a lot of places left to go, if I wanted to make something of myself," she said, frankly. "So yeah, I guess I am."

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The Beach, Saturday Morning

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