The sky burned with the acrid tang of sulfur, lending the air a taste and smell that would have been wholly unbreakable if she didn't work to block it out. Her very human body would have died within minutes were it not for both void and Anima power coursing through her flesh. Down here on the sulfur fields, large harvesting machines equipped with oversized gravity treads lay cold and abandoned, their cabs fogged with steam and suffer. The atmosphere of Io was thin, a sort of yellowish haze that glowed by the light of Sol and spread an indistinct haze over the towering silhouette of Jupiter and its many bands of color.

What atmosphere there was was warm, heated by lakes of fiery molten silicate.

She took a step across the planet's crust, breaking the brittle formation of yellowed sulfur

Renegade/ rebel was angry, but that was hardly unusual. She kicked at a mound of sulfur which crumbled and scattered over the surface of the moon in a slow wave. The gravity here was only eighteen percent that of earth, and everything that moved did so with a sort of sluggishness associated with videos of the first moon landing.

She looked up at the sky again, another round of frustration filling her with a slow boiling rage.

She had never been particularly patient; a warrior since before the dawn of time, she was used to action and danger. For literal billions of years she had fought for the makers as the very universe formed around them. She was meant to command armies, call up legions and cast stars into darkness.

But here she was, waiting on this stinky mud pit, for the orders of a grumpy construct whose fight equated to a toddler throwing a tantrum at the grocery store. She frowned at the metaphor, the thought certainly didn't belong to her.

It belonged to the OTHER part of her, the weak part.

She tried to shake it away.

After all this time fighting ancient beings, older than time itself, and stretching into a fifth dimension, now she was relegated to waiting around just to crush a few fleshy bags of meat.

She hated it.

Hated it

Hated it

It was an insult to her abilities. She could have been, should have been leading this army, could have crushed them all in seconds, but instead she was standing here and she was waiting.

"By the architect's beard stop whining/" She bristled and lifted a hand to her mouth as the voice broke from her lips unbidden. Not her own voice, but the voice that belonged to IT, the creature that lived inside her, who had tried to take away her identity and turn her into something weak.

"Oh shut up, you're a piece of garbage and I turned you into a work of art, then you had to go and ruin it for the second time, just like you always ruin everything."

There was that voice again.

Renegade hissed, "Shut up."

She tried to shove the stupid construct creature back in its place, but it was strong and did the mental equivalent of slapping her away causing her to recoil sharply. The act scared her on more than one degree. The creature shouldn't have been as strong as she was, but yet more and more she was venturing out from the very reaches of Rebel's mind.

The sensation was disconcerting, like having a spiritual parasite, and one that she couldn't get rid of, one that was threatening to take over her head if she didn't do something about it.

"Damn straight you should be scared, arrogant bitch."

She turned in a circle trying to hide her sudden loss of control from the other void soldiers that waited not so far off.

The other entity grabbed onto her thoughts before she could articulate them, "Yeah, your vast and glorious army." Not so far distant half a dozen void creatures growled and made rude gestures at each other.

"Really impressive, honestly I am stunned by your military prowess."

She snarled, doing her best to grapple the construct back into her hole, but found to her horror that it was surprisingly strong, and stubbornly refused to move, taking up space in her head like an unwanted guest might sprawl out on the living room couch.

"I You are a worm, and I will crush you like I have crushed everything else."

The other entity, the entity that called itself "maverick" snorted. Renegade gritted her teeth, she hated that name , the meaning a bastardization of her own truth.

"A lot of talk from the person taking orders from an ego maniacal beetle. If you were half of the things you are always going on about inside your head than we would be leading this army in our last assault to blow up earth or some shit, but instead, we are sitting here on a planet that smells vaguely of flatulence bitching and moaning about how your task master won't let you off your leash."

"Wrong." She snarled.

Maverick paused for a moment and then added dryly, "Yeah, yeah I guess I am." That almost surprised Renegade before, "The planet smells greatly of flatulence."

Renegade snarled and turned in a circle, fists clenched as if looking for someone to fight, but of course there was no one there.

Sensing her intentions, Maverick jeered at her, "Stop hitting yourself."

Through gritted teeth, the renegade took a deep breath, "one of these days, I will take the time to sit down, find you, drag you out of whatever crevice in my head you are hiding in, and I will destroy you."

"You can't. I AM you. We are US, I am as much part of it as you are..... "She sighed, "YOu might not like it but imagine how that makes me feel. All my life I have worked to be loyal, honest, brave, and kind only to learn that my very soul, the very foundation of my being is a traitorous, winy, arrogant bitch!"

Renegade snarled again and turned sharply on her heel.

Maverick laughed, "Look at you, pathetic." Rebel continued to growl as Maverick mocked her further, "What does it have in its pocketsis." She said in a high pitched manic voice, "Look at us, sitting here arguing with ourselves, the next thing you know, we are going to be crawling around on all fours eating raw fish and saying, my precious..."

Rebel was given a flash of a memory that did not belong to her,

A bald, humanoid creature, crouching on all fours and arguing with itself.

"Which one of us is Smeagol and which one of us is Gollum."

She shoved the useless memory violently aside, "I am not looking for your stupid memories, now SHUT UP!"

"Don't raise your voice or they might hear us." Maverick chided, just as loud as ever, "When are you going to realize that you can't get rid of me. I am as much a part of you as you are..... I would honestly like to think I am the upgrade."

Renegade shook her head doing her best to avoid tearing out her hair, which stuck out in an unruly halo around her head. Maverick liked to keep the hair short, so in an act of almost childish defiance Renegade was trying to grow it out. She hated the way it looked, hated the way that THEY looked inside this weak and stupid construct body, but she hated Maverick even more than she hated how they look at that moment.

"The architect knew exactly what he was doing when he sent us to earth to live as a construct. He knew that we needed a little bit of humility, to rely on others.... To not always be the best at everything all the time."

The thought of the architect made her blood boil. Now there was one person that she hated far more than she hated maverick, and if she ever got her hands on him, she was going to kill him, no questions asked.

Maverick snorted, "Yeah right, you can't even Kill Kazna.'

She was nearing the end of her rope, reaching up to pull at the roots of her hair,, "Stop."

"We miss OUR friends Renegade, not MY friends OUR friends." She tried to block out the noise of Maverick's voice, but the sound was loud inside her own head, "Krill, Katie, Dzara. Kanan, Nairobi, Sunny, Adam.... Ramirez."

Renegade hissed and recoiled.

The name hurt her, singed her with a longing ache of guilt and homesickness that almost made her nauseous, and the worst part of it all.... It didn't all come from Maverick, some of it came from her, welling up inside her chest with a sense of longing so acute that it made her bones ache.

She hated it, hated that name, hated HIM.

"Ramirez " Maverick repeated

She shook her head in frustration attempting to shake the thoughts and feelings from her mind that intruded upon her with the slow finality of a rising tide.

"Ramirez." Maverick said again, brandishing the name against her with a flood of memories.

Golden eyes

Sun tanned skin

The sound of metal cutting in long luxurious waves over ice.

She wanted to scream but desperately didn't want to attract attention. Her chest hurt, a deep, dull thrumming ache that made her nauseous.... And with it came guilt.

Maverick clamped onto the guilt, duel wielding it along with his memory, "How do you think he must have felt when we left.... Bet it hurt him.... A lot. I think we were just starting to figure things out, and he had been so patient.. We've been friends for the better part of a decade you know."

"Less than ten years." Renegade scoffed, "Less than a tiny fraction of our life, miniscule, meaningless."

"Keep telling that to yourself. Name one memory in your billions of years of life that can hurt you like this, and I promise I will be quiet for the rest of the day."

"I am not playing this game with you."

"That's what I thought."

And then mercifully she stopped talking for a moment. Renegade hoped upon hope that maybe she was done needling her, but the next time she spoke her voice was soft and sad, "I wonder..... When we come back, if he is going to forgive us."

The pain of that thought was even worse, causing Renegade to erupt in rage. This time she managed to strike Maverick into the back of her head, flooding herself with anger to mask the pain that burrowed into her like a noxious barbed worm.

She couldn't stand it

She couldn't stand not knowing.

Not knowing if he would ever forgive her for what she had done.

And maybe that was a part of this all, maybe she just didn't want him to see what she really was, to look in his eyes and admit what she really was.

A traitor