For a time, two nights and one day, I knelt by his bed as Alexander lay lifeless and empty of all that I had come to love. His eyes no longer shone with determination, but were closed as if in peaceful sleep; it had been many days since one could tell the brown iris from the blue. His neck canted as always to the side, chin tilted up as if he were always looking to the heavens. Even in death, he seemed to reach into the unknown, while I sat dazed. I sat frozen, forgetting all propriety. I do not know if I wailed like the other eunuchs; I did not pull my hair or beat my chest like Roxane did even before his death. I did not mourn. I simply sat there, reminding myself to be grateful for the time he had given me. I could not look to the future, for it lay covered in darkness; I knew too well what may lie in waiting for someone like me, who were not a man, but a commodity. Even grown as I was, I still caught the looks of men and women alike. With my King dead, what I had were my looks. They were both my solitary asset, and the cursed arrow which always finds its target but never brings death. I had long since stopped looking for ways to die. Now the alternative once more seemed a valid option.
I closed my eyes, and my hand around the King's hand to better feel his callouses and let the clamor behind me fade. Even behind closed doors, I could still hear them, like jackals when the lion dies. My arm ached, needing proper tending, but I paid it no mind. I did not open my eyes for a long while, not before the din had faded, and my arms had gone to sleep from exhausted tension. Beside me, the night lamp too had flickered into death. All around me was darkness; it was but too easy to slip into its depths.~*~
All over town, tablets light up with the sudden flash of a hologram. There, in the Arrival room, sits a young someone as if dead to the world, or sound asleep. His hair is long and dark, almost blue in the unforgiving lights of the metallic cylinder. His (her?) left arm is bandaged with a bit of towel, which peeks out through a gash in the plain linen sleeve of his or her tunic. She sits slumped, close enough to the rounded edge that soon he'll fall from sheer force of gravity. His hands rest on his knees, sliding further up to bunch the sturdy fabric of his clothes as he leans backwards.
Slowly. Slow like creeping death, the scales tipping, until...
The fingers twitch on covered thighs, long nail beds with trimmed tips curving into claws as if preparing to strike or placate - whichever would make for a better fit. Then the chin lifts, like one drunk on sleep who should be wide awake, and the body snaps itself to lucidity. The eyelashes next, smudged black with kohl, twitching under thick but shapely eyebrows. So he is a man, or a boy, of a different stroke than any who has come here before.
Then something registers - the cold, perhaps, of the metal against his bare feet, or the sudden, unwelcome tumble through the air. His eyes fly open mid-air, pale brown in the overhead glare of the device mounted on the ceiling. He gasps, half a second later coming to the floor with a loud thud. He catapults himself away from the platform in a whirlwind of limbs and fabric and hair down to his waist.
"Oh!" He cries out, bare feet making soft little sounds on the floor from sudden perspiration - his heart beats too fast in his chest, too loud in his head and too hard against his ribs. Suddenly he can't breathe for the shock. "Oh!" He cries again, one hand going to his heart, the other to gather his robes around him. He twists, spins in his panic to find a way out, he looks without seeing, not just afraid of the situation, but fearful of everything in there with him. A chamber of metal, a pedestal of the same, and a veritable monster up above. He screams.
Sikander dead, and now I am to share his fate? His mind rebels; all thought leaves him then, instinct his sole companion. He may not want to live as he once did, some twelve or thirteen years ago, but he is struck at once by Revelation. He doesn't want to die.
He throws himself at the rounded wall, scratching, clawing, banging on it. "
Help! Somebody, please, I beg of you!" He cries out in broken Greek*; it has been his tongue for an age, but grief and hysteria makes for a blunt edge. He would climb the walls if he could. "
Let me out! Please, let me out, don't let me die in here, please! Hello?! Is there anyone there?!"
They say the hand of wisdom should go before the mouth of indiscretion.
Of course, they say so many things.
[*OOC: Bagoas speaks two languages, one being his mother's tongue, Old Persian, and the other being ancient Greek, which he's learned over the past ten or so years (333-323 BC). For the purposes of portraying this, "
italics" will denote Ancient Greek. In addition, stressed words in that language will be in italics and bold. As such, your character very probably won't understand a thing (unless you click the handy dandy subtitles/dubbing feature on your tablet, or has studied ancient greek for fun and games or extra credit). When he speaks in Old Persian, it will be plain, simple English. "Like so". The aliens have watched enough sci-fi and historical dramas to know
Everybody Speaks English, no matter what time or place they come from - unless they don't.]
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