Trust (Part Five/Five)
Trust Five/Five
All Carth really knew of that day was blood and fire. Morgana screaming, children crying, Yun clawing at him, vomiting blood onto the floor, his pretty smile lost in the agony of death. And Carth had shaken him off, shrieking, though Yun cried for him, pleaded for his love, for his help, and Morgana lay broken up ahead. Carth left Yun in the rubble, where he was quickly crushed by a falling beam, his head exploding from the pressure like a water-filled sack. Kori’s visor was knocked off by a flying bit of rubble; blindly, he stumbled right over the edge of a pit, into a hole of fire and hard rock, never emerging. Carth would always remember those blank pale-blue eyes like dead eyes, staring forever into nothing, sunken back in that broken skull, alien.
Yun, whom he had loved, really – and a love to rival that for his wife – was seeping over the floor, pale hand spasming. Carth might have saved him. He might have.
Morgana had a sheet of metal through her chest, and she lay trembling in the seizure throes of the end, the side of her face missing in a map of wounds; her remaining eye locked on Carth with desperation, the trust that he would help her, save her.
She trusted him. Her little bird’s hand clutched his sleeve and hung on, bleeding nails and singed flesh, jets of death shooting from her lips, she died in his arms as he screamed.
Feet everywhere. A boy lost in the twisted burning wreckage, and no matter how Carth looked, no matter how he yelled, no familiar voice yelled back. There was no beautiful Dustil, the boy who looked so much like his mother, and moved so much like her, and spoke so much like her, who asthma would be laboring in this smoke, who could very well be suffocating then, or who could be simply crushed under the stampede of Sith and panicked civilians.
Carth ran. He ran forever, across the street, past the tree which now burned, and everywhere the carnage followed. He lay shrieking and weeping on the bathroom floor, a sink spraying black, where a little girl lay dead with her skirt tied around her neck. Hands heaved him up from the memories of beautiful smiles and glinting knives, climbing trees and hot dinners. The world moved and shifted and Carth only laughed, watching his universe go up in smoke and rivers of blood, and when he woke the next day in the emergency ward he screamed for his son.
His pleads for Yun as well as Morgana were emitted from the report. It was clear what he wanted most was his son, lost forever in tons and tons of metal and live wires, smoldering piles of corpses; a world razed.
The Sith marched. Saul threw his head back and laughed. Morgana burned, and had her ashes scattered all over the poisoned world, which was stained with memories and blood. Kori’s visor was given to Carth as a gift, but then the thing was lost in a move, and he never really missed it. It reminded him too much of Dustil, and more so of Yun, who had put his life in Carth’s hands, and who Carth had left to die.
Trust and Love to Carth died, too, that night. And as Carth stepped away from Telos, he stepped away from those feelings, and remembered them never again.
Time moved onwards. No hands would ever pry Carth out of the shell he had been born into – never.
-fin
Note: It was a great effort for me to bring myself to post this piece, and I'm aware of characterization issues, but I thought this would be a good introduction to the person Carth is now. If you've read this through I would really like to thank you for your patience. (I'm aware that this ending chapter is shortest yet, but it needed to be by itself.)