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He has no idea how long he has been here. He remembers.... fragments. Remembers capture, and Peacekeepers, interrogations and beatings. Remembers being sold to the eyeless witch-priestess, remembers dark presentiments and begging the soldiers to keep him. After that, there is only the sickly-sweet haze of incense and half-remembered dreams.
Except, of course, for the times she comes to him. Stark remembers those, every one of them, with a grotesque, sharp-edged clarity. Her bony, withered hands upon his face, clutching at his mask; his own emaciated limbs yearning to push her away, but unable to do more than twitch feebly atop the grimy bed. Then, always, the familiar painful beauty as his energy spills forth, released from the confines of his body. For a glorious, fleeting moment, it feels like freedom. And then she is there, and the illusion of freedom gives way to a slavery more complete than the Peacekeepers ever imagined.
She sucks at his energy as a leech-worm sucks at blood, once-vibrant gold thinning now to sick, rusty yellow. Microt by microt he can feel himself diminishing, the essence of his life, his soul, draining away. The pain of it is difficult to bear. Harder still is the heartbreak of his own treacherous thoughts. He cannot stop himself from wondering, Is this what Zhaan felt?
Even that is not the worst of it, for she does not merely take from him; she also gives. He can feel her mind, slimy and dank inside that desiccated body, rotten with the festering wounds of painful memory. She leaks memories, seethes with them, sends them pouring through him in filthy, septic floods. She uses him, and remembers being used; hurts him and remembers being hurt. Memories of her eyes being taken from her, her innocence taken, her freedom taken, her soul twisted into distorted shapes to become the creature she is. He understands, all too well, and he would be moved to pity for her if there were any room left in him for pity. But there is only hate and anger now. The more she takes of him, the more of herself she forces into the gaps she has made in his soul, the more the hatred grows, and the less he remembers of compassion.
One more session will do it. One more tug of his mask, one more siphoning of his soul, and she will have all she needs, have enough stolen life to bring youthful vigor back to withered limbs, vision back to sightless eyes. One more bedside visit and she will have everything she believes has been taken from her, and he... He will be dead.
Stark has been afraid very often in his life, but never, never afraid like this. Not afraid to die; he knows death far too well for that. Part of him almost longs for it, longs to rejoin the souls who wait for him on the other side. What he fears is not death, but the lack of it: that when at last he is allowed to die she will have all of him, all of him. That there will be nothing left to go... anywhere. The passage home he has shown to so many will be closed to him, and there will be no joyous release, only darkness and oblivion. Of all he's suffered, that thought alone is too much for him to bear.
But always within himself he has hidden a reservoir of strength, of hope. It did not desert him during cycles of slavery, did not desert him in the Aurora Chair or in the bleak days after Zhaan had gone. Though deeply buried, it has not deserted him now. He gathers what remains of his awareness and turns it to the memories of the dead, searching, crawling, sorting through the ghosts until, at last, he grasps the one he wants. It is strong and fresh and vibrant, and a thin, thin cord connects it to something far outside him. Crichton.
He talks to the remnant, cries to it, sends it visions. The string tenses, vibrates, hums, but he can't tell where it goes, can't tell if it reaches its destination at all. Even if it does, it may do no more than give the human troubled dreams. But at least he has done something.
**
His desperate cry for help takes the very last of his strength, and when she comes again, he has no more will to fight her. She cackles gleefully, her darkness bathed in golden light, and she sucks at him like vacuum. Lost in vacuum, cold and dark and hopeless, he lets her.
When Crichton finally arrives, there is very little of him left.