Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

Deorum (Of Gods)

All right, this is the last (and longest) part of Deorum!  The rest of the story is in this tag (Parts I, II, III, IV, and V).  This takes place a about a week and a half after Part V, and includes the grand reveal about Jack’s…situation.  I hope you guys like it, and thanks so much for sticking with me through this mess of a story!  If you have any questions, I have a bunch more stuff worked out for the universe, so feel free to ask away.

The newly arrived family across the hall from Jack hadn’t tried to invite him over again, but Marcus and his wife—Dorothea-call-me-Dot, as Jack learned upon meeting her—still greeted him when they passed.  He knew that the son, Jesse, was quiet and smiled shyly at him, and Apollo had been elated with the boy’s interest in art, and that Mac, the daughter, was buoyantly energetic at all times and drove her parents to distraction.  Dot was handling the adjustment better than her husband, which he knew for a fact because he had seen her talking to Sekhmet about getting blood out of clothes after Mac’s latest mishap.

Marcus, on the other hand, had almost swooned when he saw Hapi and Bragi together in front of Starbucks.  Jack had been more than a little judgmental when he saw Marcus waver and grip the edge of the table outside.

So it was a shock when there was a sharp hammering on his door on Wednesday afternoon, and Jack opened it to reveal Marcus standing there and looking disheveled.

“What’s wrong?” Jack asked, sweeping a glance over the man.  His usual tidy suit was missing its jacket and his hair stuck up in clumps as if he’d been dragging his hands through it.

“Have you seen my kids?” Marcus asked, skipping any semblance of polite greeting.

Jack paused.  “…no? Are they not where they’re supposed to be?”

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thesallowbeldam asked: If you're still doing prompts? Cry-lo Ren travels to Korriban (for whatever reason) and takes shelter in a Sith tomb. The spirits of the dead take this fantastic opportunity to rip this pathetic immitator a new. I'm talking Com. Plete. Savage. Bollocking. (that means a lecture btw)

My buddy, my pal, it’s safe to assume that I’m ALWAYS taking prompts.  (I might get to the point where I’m busy enough that it might take me a while to fill them, but I’m always taking prompts.)  Now, I’ll admit that I’m not super well versed in Sith history, and the Sith Lord I’m most familiar with is…well, Vader, who failed to die a Sith Lord and didn’t get entombed on Korriban.  I’ve always kind of liked the mental image of Darth Sidious being disappointed in Kylo, though, so yeah.  Also, I don’t know what happened to Palpatine’s ghost and it appears that neither does anyone else, so we’re going to handwave some stuff because Force.

Personal shuttle crashes are, generally speaking, remarkably easy to survive.  Battlestars or cruisers are bulky and built to survive damage in the black, but a planet-side crash turns them into an avalanche of wreckage.  Fighters, small and quick and light, shatter like glass more often than not, and even when they don’t, their mostly-engine structure doesn’t play well with the heat of a crash.  A personal shuttle, though, is small and sturdy and designed to survive an emergency landing, even if the emergency in question is ‘falling out of the sky.’

“Engines do not just kriffing fail,” Kylo Ren hissed as he pulled himself out of his shuttle and trying to adjust to the heavier gravity.  He snarled a string of curses in a handful of languages, giving a sharp kick to the hull and repressing a grimace of pain.  Snoke would be furious if he missed his ordered arrival time, no matter how good his explanation was, and Kylo felt a shudder down his spine.  He refused to admit that it might be fear.  “There isn’t even anything wrong with this piece of bantha shit,” he shouted, thumping it with a fist.  He raked a gloved hand through his hair—the helmet was still inside the shuttle somewhere—and stared around him at the valley he’d wrecked in.

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