#fbatn

Because I have lived my life in debt I’ve spent my days in deep regret Yeah, I’ve been living in the red Oh, ‘cause I can’t forgive and I can’t forget

—

It’s an odd feeling, being content.

It’s odder, considering the context of it. You’re dead, and trapped in death with more than a few people who have no cause to like you, and there’s no certainty as to how long this situation is going to continue - but you’re content. You can’t remember the last time you were content in life; first it was schoolfeeding, then it was rising through the ranks of Orphaners, then it was Mindfang and helming and always pushing yourself for more one way or the other. Then, of course, it was Dol, and death, and more time than you want to consider trapped in your own head. You weren’t content even when you were sleeping, which was more often than not.

Now it’s Suf, sprawled languidly over you and under your cape, and you’re discovering that contentedness is sand through your fingers and a little like heartbreak. This can’t last forever, you know, but while you have it…

This has been good for you.

“I can hear you thinking, Dualscar,” Suf says into your shoulder. You’ve learned the hard way that he doesn’t sleep much but he does sleep often, and one of the silent arrangements you’ve come to is him napping on you every so often while you read, since he likes the contact and you’ve got nothing else to do. Probably one of the reasons that you’re content is that you have time to read now, and there’s a library steadily growing at Dol’s place of media that people remember.

This one… is likely Dol’s. There’s still not much in the way of things to read, and rainbow drinker romances are probably a treasured remembrance of Alternian culture or something, which is definitely the reason you are putting it in front of your eyes.

“I am insulted,” you begin, “that you think one second a’ my attention could be torn from the plight a’ these star-crossed lovers, an’ furthermore-”

Suf wriggles just enough that you can see the curve of his grin without craning your neck. “Give me a couple hours before you’re distraught and need comforting.”

For all his tone is warm and light, there’s exhaustion underneath. He’s used to being run ragged, to catching sleep where and when he can, and his body still hasn’t caught up with the fact that he’s safe. Sometimes you wonder if part of that is you, if your blood triggers some fight-or-flight instinct in him that makes it hard to relax around you - but you don’t have any evidence of that, and you’ve learned to hear the sound of your own fears talking, a little. He wants to be here, and you want him to be here. That has to be enough.

You lay one hand along the flat of his back, tug his stolen cape into a better alignment, and settle in. The slow in-out of his breathing fades into the background, and you let yourself sit in the moment.

—

Suf wakes up gentle this time. A few times he’s catapulted off you from day terrors, or instinctively heading to the nearest door because something you’ve done reminded him of being shaken awake and shoved out a door by Dol. You’ve had to learn how to work with the trust he’s shown in you and sometimes, you almost feel like you’re getting there.

“’Ciple’s the cat,” he says, stretching against your hand on his back and yawning. It’s only when he does that you realise you slipped your hand under his shirt at some point, and probably woke him up by rubbing your thumb along his side. You picked up the habit from when he’s been awake, but you’re not sure how you feel about it when he’s asleep. It seems more possessive than you should be aiming for, more you bending him to your whims than you’re comfortable with.

“Sorry,” you say, and move your arm to the top of the seating block, which you’re fairly certain is a safe location.

Suf looks at your hand, then back at you, frowning. “You,” he says, eventually, sounding so much like Dol that you nearly flinch, “really have been thinking.”

“I have been known to, on occasion,” you drawl, laying the sarcasm on thick in the hopes of deflecting him. Instead, he rolls over until he’s straddling your waist, pinning you to the seating block. When he doesn’t say anything, instead chewing on a corner of his lip thoughtfully, an alarmingly analytical look on his face, you risk shifting backwards so you can sit up a little more. “I’m tryin’, Suf, but you’re sendin’ some mixed signals.”

“You’re not jumpy like this around Psi,” he says, thoughtful. “So it’s something about me.”

“I have no idea what you’re talkin’ about,” you tell him, the usual fears creeping into the edges of your mind. “I’ll have the conversation’, Suf, but I ain’t sure what conversation we’re havin’.”

“You always-” Suf waves his hands in frustration. “I don’t know how to describe it. You act like I’ve got a foot out the door and any little thing is going to be the last straw. You don’t turn into a doormat with Psi.” When you don’t say anything, because that was the last thing you expected Suf to complain about and you’re too busy trying to scrape your wits together enough to at least attempt an explanation of you and Psi, he droops a little. “It’s just- I don’t know. Sometimes it feels like you’re afraid of me.”

You laugh before you can stop yourself, pressing your hand over your mouth a little too late to do anything. When his expression turns worried, you reach up to his face, then reconsider and let your hand drop before it reaches him. “You fuckin’ terrify me,” you tell him, instead, digging the fingers of one hand into your abandoned cape, where he won’t see.

“And Psi doesn’t?” Suf asks, bewildered. “The man who shoots lasers out of his face and hates you. You’re fine with him.”

You groan and let your head thunk back against the arm of the seating block, narrowly avoiding catching your horns. “Psi an’ I…”

He knows what you’re like, is the thing. He’s seen you and Psi together, he knows that you’re both fucked up. You’d thought he’d come to terms with it, with Psi at least, but apparently he hasn’t considered it too far past the surface of things.

To be entirely fair, the surface of things was distracting enough that you can’t blame him.

“He hates me,” you say, eventually, and shrug a little. “I ain’t gonna be able to change that, with our reasons, and we ain’t friends, so.”

Suf gives you an odd look, then shakes his head. “So, what, you’d trust me if I hated you?”

“I ain’t sure why you don’t,” you say, and then freeze. You didn’t mean to say that; you can almost feel the disapproving glare that Dol uses when she smells self-pity. You wouldn’t be surprised if it could tunnel through walls. “There ain’t much in the way a’ things to recommend me to someone like you,” you mutter, trying to make it better. Justified pity may be a short step above gratuitous pity, but it counts. “Psi likes to fuckin’ roll around in my control issues, but I ain’t sure how to turn them off around you, alright? An’ if I overstep, you’re the one that gets hurt. An’ I’m still a highblood, an’ you’re still you. It’s fuckin’ subconscious sometimes.”

Suf’s silent for a long time. “So you want ‘subjugating the lowblood’ roleplay?” he finally asks, dubious.

“What?” you yelp, sitting up and nearly headbutting him in the process. “Suf, no, what the fuck, I just said-”

His laughter cuts you off. At first it makes you even more afraid, but he rests a hand on your shoulder to support himself as he wheezes, “Your face,” and you relax slowly.

“You’re the worst,” you tell him, your heart still trying to find its normal rhythm. “You are absolutely fuckin’ abysmal. I can tell you this because I hate you now.”

Suf grins, and before you can do anything, leans in to kiss you. Your hand automatically curls around his shoulder, and when you realise, you try to tug away. He reaches up to keep it there and kisses you again, longer this time. You make a pathetic noise in the back of your throat that you will deny for the rest of your miserable existence. “I might not know about control issues,” Suf says, when he pulls away, “but I know about fear.”

“I ain’t afraid,” you say, confused and a little breathless.

“Yeah you are,” Suf rebuts. He twines his fingers through yours and looks down, shadowing his eyes enough that it’s hard to tell where he’s looking. “Afraid of things breaking. Afraid you’re going to be the one who breaks everything. Afraid of hurting people, afraid of who you are.”

You swallow, and tentatively slide your other hand along his cheek. “Suf…”

He forces a smile. “I kept myself lonely for a long time so I wouldn’t hurt anyone.” He’s quiet for a moment, then leans into your hand, closing his eyes and sighing. “I treated Psi and Disciple as too precious to fuck up and that fucked us all up extravagantly. Don’t do it to me.”

Carefully, you tilt his head so you can kiss the corner of his mouth. You don’t think you’ll ever be able to say the words that explain how pathetically important he is to you - Psi hates you, and that’s good, you think, it keeps you honest, but Suf makes you want. You want to be someone who will never hurt him. You want to be worthy of him so much that it makes you ache, and it’s worth all the pain of dragging yourself through the glass you made of your life. Dol did a little of the same, in the short time you knew her before you died, but you were still the Orphaner Dualscar then. You don’t know how to reconcile that self with the person you are now, and it hurts, but you can’t not make the effort now.

“You fuckin’ ruined me,” you tell him before kissing him again. He laughs, only for it to stutter into a moan when you nudge him into a deeper kiss. He loops his arms around your neck and rolls his hips against you in a slow rhythm, almost absent-minded as he slides his tongue against yours nearly in time. It’s leaving you a little light-headed, but you don’t need to concentrate - the opposite, really. He pulls away to breathe after a moment, pressing his forehead to your shoulder before mouthing at your vestigial neck gills like he can’t stand to not be doing something. When you work your hands carefully under his shirt - big enough that it’s stolen from you, you think - you can feel his breath hitch under your hands against your throat. “I wake up an’ panic,” you whisper, hoarse, before you can convince yourself not to. “That it’s- not here. That I don’t get you.” You swallow, your hands tightening on his sides. “I don’t know why I’d get you.”

Suf laughs again, but it feels - wrong, somehow. Self-recrimination in a single syllable, something you’re all-too-familiar with. “Yeah, it’s a fucking mystery,” he says, bleak and too quiet. “Psi practically worships the ground I walk on and hates me for how we imploded when we were alive. Then along comes someone who just - likes me. Who wants me, not memories.” He lowers a hand and presses it against your gills, making you jolt in surprise as the feeling goes straight to your toes. “I’ll tell you when you fuck up,” he says, and digs his fingers in. You shift your grip to his hips and gasp through your teeth, doing your best to pay attention. “You’d be working to be better no matter what,” he says, and strokes teasing lines against your gills, too light to do anything but keep you squirming. “But you decided to try it with me. And I’m- I’m fucking awful at everything about quadrants, I don’t know why you chose me.”

“Suf,” you beg, and tug at his shirt. He takes his hands off you to help you remove - yes, your shirt, he keeps thieving your clothing and you’d give him all of it if he just asked - and you throw it across the room before sliding your hands up his back, trace your nails back down and watch him shudder. “You’ll tell me, you won’t - don’t let me fuckin’ ruin you.”

He kisses you hungrily, like you’re the first person he’s kissed in a thousand sweeps and he’s making up for lost time. You bury your hands in his hair and kiss him like you know there’s a thousand sweeps without this sort of touch waiting for you, finally discarding your fear that he’ll abandon you if you don’t toe the line of the boundaries you’ve set in your head. He’ll tell you. He’ll tell you, he’s here with you, and this time is yours.

He yanks at your shirt impatiently and you lean back to let him pull it off. When you take over getting it around your horns, he pushes you back into the block and follows you down, pressing his chest against yours and laving his tongue against the gills of your neck. You moan in response, one of your hands going to a death-grip on the arm of the seating block and your hips snapping up before you can stop yourself. He echoes your moan, one hand going to the meat of your thigh and digging in hard enough that you’ll be surprised if there aren’t bruises tomorrow, even through the increasingly-embarrassing sodden mess of protection your pants offer.

“I want you,” you tell him, the words not feeling as stupid and forced as this sort of talk usually does to you. You’re not thinking now, just reacting, and all your reactions are more. You’ve been afraid of asking for more for as long as you’ve been in this situation, but - fuck. He groans at the roughness of your voice and scrabbles one-handed at your pants. “Want everythin’ you’ll give me, I’ll fuckin’ - I’ll beg, I’ll-” You cut off with a gasp as his fingers twine with your bulge, tugging it the last little bit out of your sheath.

“I know you would,” Suf says, his voice only a few rough degrees away from a growl. He manages to crawl down the length of the seating block to peel off your pants, your efforts hindering as much as they help. “I don’t want you to be thinking hard enough for begging.” He moves forward, just enough that he can comfortably reach your bulge again, then stretches it to its full length, leaving you pushing desperately back into the seating block, your breath coming in ragged gasps. Then, before you can recover, he bends down and taking as much of your bulge as he can fit into his mouth.

“Fuck,” you gasp, “Fuck, Suf-” He looks up at you and slides his mouth along your bulge another impossible inch, the seal of his mouth hot and wet and too much. Then he backs off a little and you don’t want to believe that the keen you just heard came out of you. “Don’t fuckin’ stop, I’ll- ungh-”

He moans with you as he sinks back down, fitting more of your bulge into his mouth somehow as the sound reverberates through you - where is it fuckin’ going, he doesn’t have that much mouth on his body - and this time as he rises something slick tangles with the tip of your bulge. Your other hand joins its partner in gripping the arm of the seating block, desperately trying to keep yourself grounded as you whine, helpless. “I was jokin’,” you tell him, breathless, “about you havin’ a big mouth, you didn’t have to prove it-”

He meets your eyes deliberately, his mouth still too full to have any chance of talking back to you. Instead, he closes one eye in a wink before turning his attention back to your bulge. You have one chance for trepidation - what have you done, what did the wink mean, it would be alarming if you had any mental energy to devote to being alarmed - and then he swirls his tongue around your bulge as he takes you back into his mouth - and - and doesn’t stop. Before you can do much more than gasp at the feeling of his throat around you, his nose pressed against your skin - you can feel him swallowing reflexively, you are fucked and not in the obvious sense, there’s no way you’re going to be able to go back to everyday life after this - he pulls away, his tongue pressing against your bulge in an insistent rhythm the entire time, and does it again before you have a chance to recover from how fast your heart is pounding.

“Suf,” you beg, helplessly clenching your fingers around the arm of the seating block, your hips twitching desperately at his every movement no matter how hard you try to keep still for him. “I can’t- I need somethin’, Suf, fuck, please-”

He reaches a hand up without breaking stride. You immediately grab it and lace your fingers through his, like you can somehow regain your composure if you just hold tightly enough, but he has other ideas. “Like it when you take what you need,” he pants, lips shiny and wet, pressing your hand into his hair. Your fingers close reflexively at that, your bulge sending asynchronous pulses through you that make your muscles seize up, your toes curl and your nook throb. He coaxes your bulge back into his mouth and your vain hope that you were desensitized enough to the softness of his lips and the feel of his tongue gets ripped to shreds. Your hand tightens more in his hair, pulling, desperate for a sensation different enough to keep you grounded, and Suf’s rhythm gets interrupted by a whine that sounds filthier than any of his deeper groans.

“Keep goin’,” you say, not sure whether you’re asking or ordering. You punctuate it with a tug on his hair and - oh fuck, he starts sucking harder on the upstroke, hollowing out his cheeks and working his tongue against the length of your bulge, your genetic material drooling down his chin when he stops to catch his breath. He’s wholly focussed on drawing every whimper he can out of you, using everything at his disposal and seeing what works. For your part, you’re glad to leave your hand locked in his hair and let him tease out the reactions he can. When he twists a little as he sinks down onto you, you can’t resist pressing deeper into his mouth, your hand holding him there for longer than he usually waits, and when he feels you take over his arms wobble as he moans, followed by an attempted swallow as he tries to keep up with your genetic material and his own spit.

You ease up only to push him back down, which elicits another whine, and then you’re controlling him entirely. He makes desperate little noises when he changes direction, nails digging into your hips where he’s rested his hands and tongue working against your shallow thrusts. If you could still think, you’d be worried that you were being too rough, not giving him enough of a chance to breathe or swallow or rest his jaw - but he predicts your timing and moves with you, determined to stay with your pace.

With your hands as they are you can’t reach your nook, and Suf doesn’t seem inclined to, and without it every increase in sensation is frustration incarnate. You’re left writhing under him with your hand locked in his hair, gasping every breath, before you manage to get out, “Suf- fuck-” He looks up at you and your carefully-collected thoughts scatter. Fuck, you’ve never seen anything as hot as the debauched mess he’s made of himself, satisfaction in the slow way he licks his lips. You crawl back up the couch and manage to prop yourself up, then nearly lose your progress as you see him - still wearing pants, though his bulge has wormed its way out, covered in your colour and his own, pupils blown and chest rising and falling with short, sharp breaths. Your cape is still bunched up around his legs, and a selfish urge to wrap him in it hits you hard.

It takes you a minute, but you manage to get his pants undone and he slides them off, lying back against the cape when you give him a nudge. You’re not even going to attempt to return the favour, given that your teeth make it a losing prospect, and you hope he doesn’t mind - but he doesn’t seem to. You carefully balance on your knees over him and reach back to wrap a hand around his bulge - and the way he closes his eyes and the slightest noise he whimpers make your heart stutter in your chest.

You reach up and brush his hair away from his face, leaning down to kiss him as you sink down onto his bulge. The heat of him inside you nearly takes you then and there, but you stop for a moment and press your forehead against his until the feeling passes. “You’re good,” you tell him, hoarse, and rock your hips. With the way you’re leaning, you’re nearly lying on him, though most of your weight is propped on your arms.

He loops a leg over your hip and tugs until you rest your weight on him fully, reaches up to brush your hair out of your face like you did for him. “I’m not going to break, Dualscar.”

You laugh, a shapeless breath, and watch his eyes drift almost-closed when you squeeze. “I might.” You kiss him again , heedless of the mess you made of him, and break for a gasp when his bulge ripples against exactly the right spot of your nook. “Suf, you don’t even know, fuck, the way you look-” you say, your speech centre slowly losing control of your vocal chords.

“I like this,” he says, a near-chant to the lashing of his bulge. “I like - the sounds you make, Dualscar, please-” You scrape your teeth along the line of his neck and he whimpers in pants. “Like it when you stop worrying about hurting me.”

“Suf,” you groan, beyond any further conversation. You dig your fingers into his shoulders to try to hold yourself together and he whines, arching and taking you with him.

“More,” he says, grabbing your hips and pulling you down onto him, lashing desperately inside you. “More, fuck, Dualscar, I trust you, please-”

You increase the urgency of your movements, and, taking a chance, sink your teeth into him a little harder than you’ve done before. It tears a shriek from him, and you panic at first before, “-yes, fuck yes, more, Dualscar please-” spills out of his lips. When you lick the wound, the deep groan he makes goes straight to your nook, and you bite again without thinking, one of your hands sliding down to his grubleg scars and digging in.

Given his ministrations, you thought you’d be a lot further ahead on the needing-a-bucket front than him, but when you dig your fingers into his grubleg scars he does the same to your back and strains against you, whimpering your name one last time before he collapses, boneless back into the seating block. Your name - your name on his lips - takes you with him a moment later, and you take a moment to catch your breath before starting the process of finding a way to get off Suf and still fit on the seating block.

He reaches up and grabs your arm with a loose, lazy swing of his, keeping you in place. “S’fine. I’m fine,” he says, and smiles at you. His smile is tired and triumphant and smug and you feel the same.

You kiss him. He makes a surprised noise, but melts into it anyway. “We made a fuckin’ horrendous mess,” you inform him. “Where’d all that come from?”

“Mmh.” He shrugs, as much as he can lying down with you on top of him. “I like oral.”

You groan and close your eyes. “Hadn’t noticed.” Sleep is particularly appealing at the moment, but for all of Suf’s good traits, his comfort as a sleeping platform isn’t one, especially considering that you’re taller than him. You haul yourself upright, then pick him up with a grunt from you and a squawk from him. There’s a pile in the next room, so you dump him in it before staggering to a recuperacoon for your own sleep.

—

When you wake up and stumble out to the kitchen, Suf is sitting there with a piece of toast in hand and coffee in front of him, two things he’s decided that he can make without setting your hive on fire. His hair is still wet from a shower, so he can’t be too far ahead of you, which means you get to sit down for a while.

You need it. You’re more exhausted than you can remember being in two lifetimes.

“So,” you say to Suf, for lack of anything else to say. He looks up, letting you see the marks on his neck properly, and your heart sinks. You shouldn’t have let yourself go; they’re bright, bloody slashes against the grey of his neck and bruised besides. “I didn’t mean-” you say, inadequately, and gesture at his neck.

He blinks at you, then raises a hand to his neck and hisses when he bumps one of the gashes. There must be some expression on your face, because his expression goes determined, and then he presses his hand flat against the wound. The, “ah-” he gasps out, his eyes half-lidded, wakes you up the rest of the way, and then he drops his hand. “Got it?”

“Uh,” you say, and - fuck, you’re older than him by an uncomfortable factor and he’s still making you blush and gawk like it’s your first contribution. “I dunno,” you say, managing to scrape half a wit together. “You might need to demonstrate again.”

He considers the toast in front of him, then throws it at you. You grin and start chewing on it, and he smiles as he looks back down at his palmtop. “As long as you’re paying attention.” He looks up again, briefly, and then sighs. “And…” His finger circles the rim of his cup of coffee, and he looks up at you a lot more hesitantly this time. “What you said. You and Psi hate each other.” He shrugs at that. “If you think you’re not friends, you haven’t been looking hard enough. You’ve got more friends than you think.”

You look at him for a long time. He looks back at you, level, until you jerk your head in a brief nod and bite into your toast.

—

You’re not good with people, and never have been. In life it was easy enough to reduce everyone you knew to a few traits, and in death it’s been easy enough to hide from unpleasant realities. You’ve been hiding from the unpleasant reality of your own history a long time, burying yourself in controlling your own impulses. There are harder steps to face, but…

You get to pick. It’s going to be a long eternity without people by your side, and contentedness, and at some point you’re going to have to put some effort into creating it. So you’re starting easy, with a bottle in hand, and when Mindfang yanks open her door to your knock, you hold it up without words.

She looks at it uncertainly, and then at you. “Ditching your quadrants already, Dualscar?”

You could roll your eyes. Instead, you say, quiet, “Before everything, we were friends, Spin.”

Mindfang rocks onto one foot, crossing her arms and raking you with a glare. She’s harder than the Spin you knew, lost something of the kismesis she was. “Forget it. I don’t need your sanctimonious hoofbeastshit. Does it rub off on you when you’re fucking Dol’s kid?”

“’Bout as much as you wish it would when you’re fuckin’ your revolutionary,” you say, with half the bite and no less cruelty. If Psi and Suf - and Dol - have taught you anything, it’s that kindness and friendship are very different things. “I ain’t here to judge and I ain’t here out of pity.”

Mindfang rolls her eyes, the mechanical one whirring slightly. “You’re here for friendship. This is revolting, Dualscar.”

“I got sick a’ hurtin’ people,” you say, letting a corner of your mouth hook into a bitter smile. “Afraid a’ breakin’ everything because I am who I am, an’ there ain’t much that’s nice in that.”

The expression falls off Mindfang’s face, leaving someone older than you who lived through every single moment of every single mistake a long lifespan and certainty in your actions can grant someone.

“So,” you say, and hold up the bottle again. “Are we havin’ a drink or what?”

She snatches the bottle out of your hand and turns back inside, leaving the doorway open. “Empress fucking knows I can’t let you go around blubbering feelings like that when you’re sober. It’s an embarrassment to everyone who knew you when you were vaguely competent.”

You step in, close the door, and get on with making a death you can live with.

—

“You should be resting,” Dol says, her voice serene and cool and utterly disapproving. Your arm has decided to throb, your back has decided to throb in off-rhythm counterpoint just to be a fuckin’ bulge about it, and the only reason you’re standing up straight is that you’re strapped into your armour. You’re pretty sure that the armour is bad for the wound, but given that it’s the only reason you’re upright and shouldering - with your good arm, at least, you’re not insane - through the crowd, you’re inclined to keep it. “You’ll collapse, if you keep this up.”

“Dol,” you say, glaring so hard at an oncoming blueblood that they cross to the other side of the street, “I ain’t entirely certain why you suddenly decided to take me under your wing, but you are invadin’ the territory of my last fuckin’ nerve with it.” You should have never decided to go through town. Still, you want to at least have a medictator eyeball you, an’ the military docks aren’t so far if you’re already cutting through.

It takes a while to find the place that you’re looking for, and longer to get there with a minimum of witnesses, since you and Dol are hardly inconspicuous. The receptionist at the medictator’s dingy office goes white when he sees you, and it takes less than five minutes for you to be ushered through - with nobody passing you, which means that either, bad, this sawbones ain’t got much in the way of patronage, or good, there’s a more discreet exit.

Said sawbones is utterly unimpressed when you nearly pass out on her table, but Dol helps you ease your chestpiece off, and her look fades into something nearly respectful. “Would have thought you could get patched up at a place where they wash the tools between patients, Orphaner,” she says, already snapping on a pair of gloves. “I don’t think I can match this stitching.”

“I wanted somethin’ a little more off the books,” you tell her, ignoring Dol’s satisfied look. “An’ don’t fuckin’ touch the stitchin’.” Ten minutes later, your back is blissfully numb, you’ve got a collection of syringes, and your credit account has had quite a burden taken off it.

Walking the rest of the way is a lot easier, and Dol keeps her mouth shut after being proven wrong on her suppositions of you possessing a modicum of foresight, which is a blessing given that the anaesthetic does nothing for headaches. She trails you through security, makes her guest pass disappear, and only digs in her heels when you get to your ship, which has crew scrambling all over as it finishes loading up. You only gave them an hour, which is pushing it even for the military.

Dol freezes at the bottom of the gangplank, and it’s only after you’ve walked halfway up it without her that you realise she’s no longer a step behind you. Even with the distance between you, you can see her pupils have narrowed into terrified, angry slits, and the tremble in her hands.

Fuck. The ship’s got a psionic assist. You should have thought of that.

“Get on the ship, Dol,” you tell her, keeping your voice as flat and neutral as you can when you’re standing around with your back torn to pieces.

One of her hands goes to her hip as she jerks her head up at the sound of your voice. Lucky for you, she doesn’t walk around armed, although you don’t think she really needs to. “How dare you?” she hisses, but makes no move towards the gangplank.

“You got obligations to attend to,” you say, taking a couple of heavy steps towards her. “If you want my protection, you stay with me or confined to the hive. Pick one.”

Dol eyeballs you warily and shifts her weight, putting herself in a better position should she need to go for your throat again. You stop far enough away that it’d be a real hardship for her to do so. “So you brought me to a psionic ship.”

“I hadn’t fuckin’ considered it, all right?” you snap, and move forward to grab her wrist while she’s confused. Your symbol still hangs there, and you twine your fingers under it. “Look. You get on the ship, or you go back to the hive. I ain’t got the time to escort you there, an’ we both know you’ll run once you think of it, so you can either get on the fuckin’ ship with me or start runnin’.” You place some pressure on the bracelet. It’s not a particularly strong latch, because strength isn’t the point. While she wears it, she’s under your protection, provided she’s got reason to be wherever whoever checks finds her. You don’t want to leave her with it should she run. It’s far too valuable, and far too damning. “Just make your fuckin’ choice so I can get on already.”

She looks at you, some of the terror dying from her eyes, replaced by resignation. “You’re chasing Spinneret, aren’t you?” Without waiting for your answer, she jerks her wrist free. “You’ve never had to face up to the toll your pretty life takes on other people,” she says, her voice level. “The son of mine you killed was imprisoned in a psionic training camp, when he was a child. He fled into certain death rather than stay for the retrofitting that makes them able to power your ships. He had day terrors about it for three sweeps after we found him baking in the desert.”

You attempt to look attentive and interested and not like you’re trying to hide the fact that he had day terrors about it a lot longer than that. Nothing like a troll screaming in his sleep to tell you things you never wanted to know.

“He was lucky,” Dol says, soft, looking inwards. You relax a little. “If you or any of your crew dare show any disrespect to your Helmsman, day terrors will be the least of their concerns.”

She certainly has a way with conversation. You could have bought yourself a nice tealblood, but no, you had to have the Dolorosa, didn’t you? “You can fuckin’ pail the Helmsman if it’ll assuage your worries,” you tell her, and go back up the gangplank as brusquely as possible.

You’ve never really bothered to think about Helmsmen before. They’re a quiet bunch, usually, and the sailing master has more to do with them than anyone else does, excepting sometimes whatever sorry excuse for a surgeon you’ve got on board. The technology’s nowhere near what Condesce’s nerds cooked up - not as extensive, to put it politely, but enough that they can give the ship some extra oomph to make up for how they weigh it down with antibiotics.

You had to help cut an infected port out of a Helmsman’s arm, once. She didn’t flinch, didn’t squeak, even though your anaesthetics had run out a week ago and the site was so inflamed that when the sawbones prodded it with a scalpel, it oozed. She ended up killing herself three nights later by trying to navigate you out of a tight corner without all her proper conduits in place - and the thing was, it wasn’t loyalty to the ship or that she had a quadrant in the crew to protect or some big, dramatic reason like it should have been. You’d just... told her to get the ship out of there, and she did.

The lot of you buried her at sea the next night, to general mutters of ‘fucking crazy helmsmen’, and you’d requisitioned a new Helmsman once you’d limped back to port. He didn’t come to a good end either, now that you’re thinking on it, but, well, nobody in the military does - except maybe the paper-pushers.

In any case, you have more to worry about than Dol getting torn up over a Helmsman. It's probably a good thing she never went in and looked at her son, if she thinks that the current helming procedures are bad already. Dealing with Spin gone haring off and Dol in a mood at the same time is something you're less than inclined to do. You need to focus on Spin, since you have less than a clue of what she's up to now. Dol might insurrect your crew out from under you, but it's likely better than anything your kismesis has planned for you.

--

Spinneret Mindfang is smart. You like to think that you're not stupid, but at this point in your life, you're more a wadded-up ball of instinct than you are anything else. Instinct rarely leads you wrong, however, which means that you’ve been bugging Spin since the moment you met her. She destroys them, of course, either because she finds them or because she can’t hold onto something for longer than a few nights without it exploding in her face, but your latest is still active. She’s had a night’s head start on you, and knowing her she’s probably stolen a psionic as well, but you know where she is.

The fact that it appears to be the middle of fucking nowhere is a concern. Luckily for you, it’s your sailing master’s concern.

The sailing master in question is someone you’ve worked with before, an indigo with neat, folded-back horns who usually looks like she’s about to fall asleep. A small amount of the time, comparatively, she looks like she’s just ripped someone’s heart out of their chest and chewed on it a little, but that was a stressful time and she’d certainly managed to keep the crew in line without running to you over every little thing afterwards. Ignoring military conventions, because the hierarchy has its perks, you sling your arm over her shoulders and drag her into your cabin. If she notices how much weight you’re leaning on her, she doesn’t say.

“Tawret!” you say, her name finally coming to you as Dol shuts the door. That done, you collapse into a chair and try to make it look deliberate. You’re not feeling much in the way of pain, but that doesn’t mean you’re in the condition to be walking everywhere.

“Orphaner,” she replies, sounding on the edge of a yawn as usual, taking about as much notice of Dol as she does of the furniture. Without further ado, she taps your table until the screen in it lights up. “Our destination?”

You check your palmtop, then put in the co-ordinates. They’re still idly ticking away, but it’s almost like Spin’s taking a pleasure cruise, not making her escape. She might not even realise you’re alive - you did lose a lot of blood, but you don’t think Spin’s ever had cause to see exactly how hardy you are before. Most seadwellers can take a beating, but you’ve spent your life taking them professionally.

Tawret - no title, which is strange, although Pumprend is what people who have never met her call her - leans in and frowns, then swipes to change the map to show predicted currents. “There’s a lot in the way, Orphaner,” she says, as the table plays through a sped-up loop of the next few hours. “We’re nearing the equinox and tide’s falling. The water’s gonna be doing its best to shove us onto the sandbars to the east. We’ll be fighting to stay on course, afterwards.”

It’s not questioning your orders, exactly, but you have never been less in the mood for people not saluting and going forth. Some of that must come through in your face, because after a moment’s silence, she salutes and wipes the map before walking out at a faster clip than you’ve seen her use before, other than the pump-rending incident.

Dol leans over the table once Tawret’s closed the door and calls the map back up. Either she’s used the program before - unlikely - or you should be even more terrified of her smarts than you are. You’ll work on that once you’re not about to keel over in front of your subordinates. “Shouldn’t you be striding about the deck and telling people to climb rigging?” she asks, prodding at the map controls.

You snort. “Tawret an’ whoever’s first mate work that out between ‘em. I’m just the Empress’ will walkin’ around on two legs, to the ship.” It’s different on your own ship, with crew you’ve hand-picked; they all know you to put in the long hours of being an Orphaner, tracking down lusii and using your ship as an extension of yourself. They jump to your orders because you know you waters, and they’d have died messy deaths a thousand times over without you. Likely you’ll take a more active role as you close in on Spin, but with your back as it is, you’re happy to sit back and let those who don’t listen to your title think of you as one of the more useless Court members.

Dol seems unlikely to offer you a hand, ungrateful slave that she is, so you stand up using as few of your core muscles as possible - fuck, this is an inconvenient spawn of an unwashed bucket - and then begin the arduous task of pulling off your clothes. You should probably be out making an impression on the crew, but the built-in cupe in the corner of the room is singing your name very seductively, and the thought of getting sopor on your back would make you cry, if your tear ducts weren’t as dried-out as Dol’s sense of humour.

Your armour’s the easy part, which isn’t saying much. The clasps are fiddly and trying to twist back to reach them better makes your vision white out a little, but you get it off. The mechanics of getting your shirt off, however, are what defeat you. You’d just go fall in the sopor anyway, but you really want the shirt off so the sopor can do its thing with the wound, which is beginning to throb again. Hopefully you didn’t pop anything.

You try again, just in case, except this time the pain nearly knocks you off your feet and you end up with your hands locked around the back of your chair, swearing through ragged breaths.

“The muscle was hurt, Dualscar,” Dol snaps, finally looking up from the table she might as well be handfasted to. “You shouldn’t even be able to lift your arm. What are you trying to do?”

You give her the same look you gave Tawret.

She gives you an impassive look in return.

This is a cheap fight. Except you’re wobbling on your feet, your vision is swimming so hard it might make it to Spin before you do, and you’re probably about to collapse whether you like it or not. And Dol, well, Dol is an expert in giving absolutely no fucks, and will probably just stare at you until you do actually collapse, and that will be embarrassing for everyone involved.

“Can’t get the shirt off,” you say, averting your eyes and doing your best to not let your fins pin themselves back. This is the stupidest thing you’ve ever worried about - she is, in a quite literal sense, your own damn slave. Helping you get your clothes off is well within the line of duty, although you’ve never wanted that much intrusion into your personal life.

Instead of helping, like you expected - she’s been perfectly courteous all night, why would she change now? - Dol freezes, her hand jerking on the table and zooming in on an irrelevant patch of open sea. “I-” she says, then the words seem to dry up in her throat. Her other hand rests at her waist, and if she’s looking to start another fight, you might as well just hand yourself to the drones for a mercy cull now. The Orphaner Dualscar, done in by a jadeblood. History is not going to be kind to you.

You’re mentally preparing yourself to throw the chair, because going down without some sort of fight would be more shame than you can take, when she says in a whisper so dry that the words barely get out, “You tripped my submission reflex.”

The silence that falls between the two of you has a weight to it, stifling.

“I had to,” you say, uncertain. “With- Spin an’ all, it was a mite fuckin’ urgent, Dol.”

She shakes her head and looks down at the table. “I don’t care for you, Dualscar,” she says, quiet but firm. “I’ve done what I have because I want to be the kind of person my son would be proud of, because he shamed me with how easily kindness came to him, not for any feelings I have towards you. And…” Still without looking at you, she sits heavily in a chair, her face blank and serious. “There are two paths I see that led to your actions, and I like neither. Either I am not entirely real to you, in that way that the enemy is never quite real, and thus doing as you please has no real consequences - or I am real, and you don’t care.” She looks at you then, and for all that she used to set off alarms for something eerie and dangerous in your head, now she is just sad and so, so serious. “You’re terrifyingly desensitised to the consequences your actions have, in any case.”

“What was I supposed to do?” you snap, nearly throwing your hands in the air before you remember how bad an idea that would be. “Let you keep flippin’ out until Spin declared you a loss and culled us both? Had us found by security, so Spin an’ I were executed an’ you were slated to have that oliveblood of yours tortured in front a’ you for the next sweep? Isle keep it in mind, next time I get fuckin’ dismembered comin’ after you!”

“You were saving yourself,” Dol says, a chill finally colouring her voice. “I was nothing more than collateral.”

You pry yourself away from your chair, barely keeping a growl under wraps as you stalk over to the cupe and slide the lid back. The sopor’s fresh, at least, although a bit cool to the touch. At this point, you couldn’t care less. You’re going to climb in, clothes and all, and when you get back out the world might be a tad more sane. “You don’t care for me,” you finally say, once you can do it without spitting it out between your teeth. “I ain’t sure where you got the impression I cared for you, but I ain’t got a fuckin’ clue why you’d expect me to.”

A hand rests on your back, and you nearly leap out of your skin. It would be good for your continued health if your slave wasn’t a fuckin’ assassin. “Don’t be an idiot,” Dol says, finally, and you can hear the sigh in her voice. “I’ll have to cut the shirt off.”

“I like-” you say, in weak defense of your shirt, then pull the letter opener out of your boot and hand it to her. “You are sendin’ some very mixed signals, Dol.”

She pulls your shirt away from your back - oh, sticking, you definitely managed to pop a few stitches - and sets the knife to it. “Of course you like this shirt,” she mutters, a glimmer of personality coming through. “I care about people, Dualscar. I’m being incredibly charitable and believing you felt you took the best course of action. I still don’t care for you, and if you do it again under any circumstances I will make you eat your own horns, but I’m not going to make you stew in blood-soaked clothes until you feel like asking for help.” She gently bends your arm to get at the sleeve, and you nearly bite through your tongue. “As for you caring… You did attempt to bring me back.”

“You’re my responsibility,” you grumble, when she’s silent long enough for you to realise she expects a reply. “It was in the contract.”

She does sigh then, handing the letter opener back to you, not even attempting to keep it despite the way she always reverts to looking for a weapon when she panics. “I realise that the Alternian Empire is built upon it not caring about its subjects,” she says, keeping a delicate hold on the blade when you try to take it, “but being your responsibility means that I am under your care. You frame it as obligations, and you’re not wrong, but have you never simply - cared about the people working under you? Leaving aside any romantic feelings. You knew Tawret, remembered her. Somehow, she crossed that threshold from stranger to comrade.”

You repress the awful urge to laugh at the fact that Dol clearly has no idea how Tawret made an impression on you. Something in your face must look off, because she nods and lets go of the blade. “We saw it in the cooler end of the haemospectrum a lot. Trolls who thought my son was building a very nice world for other people, but they were too violent, too unable to connect to be part of it. They’d bought the Empire line that the only way to care for others is through the quadrants, and anything else is gross perversion.”

“I’m the right hand of the Empress,” you tell her, in case she’s forgotten. You’re too exhausted and slightly dizzy from blood loss for this.

“You’re allowed to do things because you care about people,” she says, and shrugs a little. “For you, it’s probably been through a framework of obligation and responsibility. You care about your crew, I’m guessing, and anyone who owes you or you owe a debt. Disciple is better at this sort of reframing than I am.”

You shake your head, letting the words wash past you. “Dol, as nice as it is havin’ your insurrection of my ship start with me, I’m takin’ off my pants an’ gettin’ in the fuckin’ sopor. Go preach to Tawret, if you want an argument.”

“-up!”

Your face hurts.

No, your everything hurts. Your face just hurts especially because Dol is slapping you, and not in the gentle hey-get-up kind of way. She draws her arm back for another go, so you cough the dry feeling out of your mouth and say, “Awake!”

She drops her hand and stares at you, then wipes her face. “Sit up,” she says, her voice hoarse. When you just stare at her, she carefully puts her hands under your shoulders and lifts.

There is a squelch, and your vision whites out, and if you scream you don’t hear it. When you come back, you have your hands dug into Dol’s shoulders, and your breath is coming in the shallowest pants possible, but you are sitting up.

“Spin,” you mumble, and pat the ground beside you, looking for Ahab’s. The ground is sticky, and your hand comes away purple.

Dolorosa takes the shawl from her shoulders and passes it behind your back. “Dualscar, for once in your life, listen to someone else. Breathe out.”

You shut up and exhale through your nose, only to sharply inhale and squeeze Dol’s shoulders even harder when she winds her shawl around you and pulls tight. “How long?” you ask, while she somehow knots it back into itself, your brain picking up pieces all the while.

She shakes her head. “Can you stand up?”

“I ain’t stabbed in the legs,” you retort. Getting your legs under you is simple enough, but standing up makes your head spin, and once you’re up you have to lean on the wall. “Just a fuckin’ cut,” you mutter, and wipe sweat off your face with a clean bit of shirt. “Had worse.”

“I’ve seen worse,” Dol agrees, and levers herself under one of your arms. Pale green remnants of tears are streaked down her cheeks, and her eyes are still glittering with more, but right now her mouth is a thin line, for all the rest of her is shaking. “Walk with me or we’ll both fall over.”

You drag your feet one laborious step. “You go in?”

She shakes her head again, stiffly.

You stop in your tracks, nearly spending the both of you sprawling. “Are you fuckin’ kidding?” At her look of incomprehension, you shuffle carefully back to the door. “Spin’s already fucked everythin’ up,” you say, and slap your hand down on the reader. It makes your shoulder ache. “Which means I’m already slated for somethin’ nasty. Might as fuckin’ well get somethin’ out a’ it.”

She looks out at the barely visible curves of the Battleship Condescension, her lips slightly parted. At first you think it’s awe, but her trembling under your arm gets more violent, and you realise that she is bone-deep afraid. “You can’t make that walk,” she says, finally.

You pry your arm off her and lean heavily on the wall. “Off you go.”

She turns away from the door and slowly shakes her head. “You’re bleeding too much.”

“I’ve bled more,” you say, defensively, and readjust your leaning arm. You’re going to sit down and fall asleep again as soon as she goes, and if you bleed out, well, it has to be better than a traitor’s punishment. “It’ll clot anyway,” you add. “Go do what you fuckin’ came here to do, Dol. You ain’t gonna get another chance.”

“I don’t know what I came here to do,” she says, and closes her eyes. After a long moment, she opens them, then places a hand over yours on the reader. “You said Psiionic was dead, Dualscar. How dead?”

You sigh and slump, giving up on looking as healthy as possible. “I don’t know much about that side a’ it, Dol, but by the end he was completely non-responsive. The science geeks called him a battery, okay?” You look away from her wince. “So pretty fuckin’ dead.”

“He would hate me for this,” Dol says, after a long moment of looking out over the Battleship Condescension. She puts her shoulders back under your good arm and steers you towards the stairs. “He may even be right to.”

“Dol,” you protest, looking up at the stairs. You really do not want to climb those. You cannot put into words how much you don’t want to climb them. “You got obligations-”

“Yes,” she says, and grimly drags you along as she climbs the stairs, going slower than a frozen turtle on your account. “I am obliged to put my money where my mouth is. I cannot have preached kindness as the right thing all this time and let you bleed to death now, Dualscar. It would be a worse betrayal of my children than leaving them to their fates.”

“But you were just prepared to end everythin’,” you say, slumping heavily on her. Every step pulls at your back, and you’re getting real dizzy again real fast. "An' you've krilled people who got in your way."

“You may not have noticed-” Dol grunts as she shifts your arm and takes more of your weight, “-but I am not doing well in the sanity department, these days. Keep going.”

You climb another step, then another, and another, your feet lead blocks on the ends of your legs and your vision narrowing to the path in front of you. You almost take the both of you down when you reach the top, trying to step onto a step that isn’t there, and only Dol hauling on you saves you from eating concrete.

“What now?” you say, and find the nearest wall to lean on again. “I don’t know about you, but I ain’t up for swimmin’ home.” You rub your face and try to focus. “Can’t go to medical here. Leave a trace.”

“Wait,” Dol says, looking down the road that divides the fake lab buildings along the length of the underground abyss. You’re more than happy to close your eyes and sag against the wall, although Dol pinches you when you try to lie down.

A short time later, she pinches you again and hisses, “There! Put on your seadweller face.”

“’S the only one I got,” you say, and open your eyes. There are two figures off in the distance, ambling closer, and you straighten yourself up and attempt to look less like you’re about to collapse regardless of how much support the wall is giving you.

As they draw closer, you recognise the uniform of the internal security staff for the compound. You don’t know these two by sight, but it’s a big compound. All of them have been approved by someone much better at investigating backgrounds than you, in any case. You have no idea what their response to seeing you casually leaning on a wall and dripping blood will be, and you’re not exactly eager to find out, but at least Dol seems to have a plan.

They’re casually amicable to each other as they get within eyeshot, but then one of them smacks the other in the shoulder and jerks his head at you and all your blood, and then suddenly you and Dol are the target of two guns and a spear. You’re about to shout at them to stand down, but before you can, Dol steps on your foot and moves serenely forward.

“The Orphaner Dualscar requires your assistance,” she says, hands carefully folded in front of her, an expectant look on her face.

“Yeah, we can see that,” the shorter of the two – a brownblood, you think, although the sign on her sleeve is hard to make out. The taller, a blueblood by the looks of him, holds his guns steady and eyes you carefully, letting the brownblood take the risk. “Weapons on the ground.”

You can barely see Dol’s face, with the angle she’s at, but you see her eyebrows lift just a fraction. “I don’t have any, and he’s hardly going to listen to you telling him what to do. If you doubt his identity, there’s plenty of proof of it on the wall.” She waits a moment, then says, “We require a boat.”

The brownblood thrusts the point of her spear under Dol’s chin. “The Orphaner Dualscar has full requisition rights. You can-”

“Rahave,” the blueblood says, suddenly. “We will escort them to the docks.”

“Bullshit!” Rahave says, narrowing her eyes. “We need to verify their identities and figure out-”

“Rahave!” The blueblood plucks Rahave’s spear out of her hands. “That is Dualscar, and I hardly want his death on my hands. If you must report the incident, then go, but I believe you will find that you run into a wall of classification beyond your pay grade.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Rahave snaps, clearly outranked. “If you think you’re safe with a mysterious jadeblood and a bleeding-out seadweller, fine! I’m going to go tell Calwen and make sure that we don’t all get culled.”

“You do that,” the blueblood says. Rahave retreats a few paces backwards, watching the three of you suspiciously, then turns and starts jogging. You can’t remember where the nearest security hub is, but it should only take a few minutes for her to reach it. The blueblood watches to make sure that his partner is gone, then turns to Dol and raises his hands to his chest, doing something that you cannot see, because you unfortunately haven’t developed x-ray vision and Dol is blocking your view.

“Oh,” Dol says, in genuine surprise. “Well.”

“Am I allowed to fuckin’ talk now?” you inquire.

“No,” Dol says, absently. “You – your name?”

“Telvin,” the blueblood supplies, dropping his hands again.

“Telvin,” Dol says. “Help me haul him to the docks.”

“Oh,” Telvin says, and walks over to you nervously. “I thought that that was an excuse. Your arm, please?”

Dol takes your other arm, the wounded one, and between them they manage to take enough of your weight that you can actually help out by putting one foot in front of the other. “I thought about it,” she says, leaving you out of a conversation about your own imminent demise. “But, well. You know.”

“Yes,” Telvin says, subdued. “I know.”

--

You make it to the docks unassailed by any further security, the speed at which you manage to make it through the compound entirely due to Telvin and his height propping you up the perfect amount to stumble along without overly compressing or stretching your giant, gaping wound. The blood seems to have slowed down, at least. You’re going to have to buy Dol a new shawl.

They have to almost juggle you to get you into the boat, a dinky thing with a motor that – well, it’ll get you where you’re going, but you’re not going to be having any fun with it. You curl up in the bow nonetheless, shifting angrily to try to find a position that doesn’t jar your back.

“Here,” Telvin says, holding out his coat to Dol. She takes it and makes you lean forward like the cruel harpy she is, spreading it along the wood of the seat that keeps digging into your side. You lean back cautiously when she lets you go and it’s better enough that your eyes drift shut. You’re ready for sleep, sopor or no.

Dol pinches you. “Say thank you.”

“Not my fuckin’ lusus,” you grumble without opening your eyes. Before she can pinch your fin again, you wave a hand at the dock, where Telvin was before sleep became imperative. “Good work on not murderin’ me, that was really well done,” you say, and then bury your head in a fold of his coat.

“Don’t sleep,” Dol says, and knocks your leg with a foot as she sits down by the motor. You groan as loudly and piteously as you can, only to remain ignored. “Thank you, Telvin.”

“Good luck,” he says in farewell, even if it is in a dubious tone.

Dol starts the motor and you’re pushed into motion, the boat slapping against the rise and fall of the water. She’s not particularly good at navigating it, but as long as you’re headed in the right direction, you no longer care.

“How did he know you?” you ask, after a few minutes of silence. Dol doesn’t answer, and on reflection, you realise that you don’t particularly want to know the answer anyway.

--

You have to go in through the wreck part of your shipwreck and climb your way up. You’ve done it before, but your feet want to slip out from under you despite Dol anchoring you, and if you never have to crawl up another nearly-vertical, half-rotten staircase again in your life, you’ll accede to the subjugglators that miracles are possible.

“On the table,” Dol says, once you get up to the main deck. She’s already dragging over a lamp, leaving you to slump exhaustedly against the back of a chair.

“We eat there,” you object, and pull yourself up with agonising slowness. “It’s fine, Dol. Night in the cupe an’ the sopor’ll do the trick.”

“Do not presume that you can lie to me.” She looks at you sharply a moment before kneeling to fetch the first aid kit from one of the cupboards. “I don’t know why you’ve suddenly developed a deathwish, but you can indulge it in your own time. For now, you can lie down on the table and cry when I take scissors to your shirt.”

It’s easier, in the end, to just lie down on the fucking table and let her cut your shirt - and her shawl - off, so that’s what you do. She looks at your arm first, washing the wound with care but not tenderness, then carefully prods and pulls at it to get a better view of your innards. Without saying anything to you, she lays out a couple of curved needles and opens some sterilised packets of stitching thread, then twists your arm into better light and starts sewing you up.

“Ow,” you protest.

“This is what happens when you get stabbed.” To her credit, she finishes quickly despite - you think, you didn’t really want to have a look, or think too long about it - having to stitch some muscle together, too. Then, while that’s twinging, she gets a fresh cloth and fresh boiled water and starts cleaning off the mess you’ve made of your back. The water running over your gills makes them flare automatically, and the only thing that stops you from scrambling off the table is Dol putting a hand firmly on the uninjured side of your back and pushing down until you stop swearing. Her arm is an iron bar with you in this condition, which is embarrassing.

“I’m fine,” you say, and settle back against the unforgiving surface of the table. At least you’re not at risk of falling asleep, now. “Don’t do that again.”

“I need to clean it,” she says, patiently.

“It can fuckin’ rot off,” you sulk, but wrap your fingers around the edge of the table so you have something to squeeze. “Do it fast, then.” She rinses the cloth and wrings it out, but just before she can torture you some more, you say, “An’ talk to me,” resolutely not looking at her.

“Very well. Hold your breath.” She runs water over the gill that Spin fouled, and holding your breath does help with the reflexes, a little. Your knuckles still go white from tension. “Why the deathwish?” she asks, and picks up a little more water, continuing in absent, distracted tones. “No, don’t talk, you’ll just fall off the table. I recall you saying that you were for a traitor’s end, but I find it hard to believe that you’ve gone from risking your life to stop Spinneret to glumly accepting your fate.”

You wait a moment, but it seems that she’s done with the rinsing. “I ain’t givin’ up,” you say, offended. “I wronged the entire fuckin’ Empire by not stoppin’ the both a’ you.” Your eyes half-close, until everything is eyelashes and blur. “I had one job.”

“This is going to hurt rather a lot,” Dol says, using a light touch to figure out how badly Spin messed you up. You grit your teeth and resettle yourself against the table, which is starting to become distinctly uncomfortable. “I’m going to have to stitch up the opercula, at least.”

“Look at the expert on seadweller anatomy,” you grumble, more to divert Dol’s attention from her line of inquiry than anything else. “Where’d you learn to surgeon us?”

“I was under the impression that you weren’t supposed to be stupid, as high in the hierarchy as you are.” She sets needle to flesh, and your fingers nearly meet through the fucking table. You’d forgotten how much a gill wound hurt, but Dol is kindly reminding you.

“Well,” you grind out, attempting to not flinch with every stab. She could kill you - could have killed you at any moment, you come to realise - but you think she’s getting more satisfaction from not killing you, at this point. Very deliberately not killing you, as the case may be. “You shoald’a seen the guy before me.”

“You murdered him,” Dol says, tying off the last stitch on your gill. “One presumes you have ambition, from that action.” A snip of scissors, a pause, and she starts in on your back, which at least doesn’t feel like much after the gill. You think you’re too tired to feel much of anything. “And yet, you don’t reside in the palace. Your hive is a wreck, and you had no servants before me. Your kismesis is a wanted criminal, and quite possibly a traitor herself. You would be an awful caretaker of the throne.”

“Don’t want the fuckin’ throne,” you mumble, letting your eyes shut again. It’s nothing you’ve not heard before, or told yourself, for that matter, but you had no intention on slotting neatly into Court life when you shot down old Acalephe. You just want someone in charge who knows what they’re doing, someone worthy of your admiration, and you’ve since shot more trolls than you can remember to keep it that way.

Your predecessors were a power-hungry, grasping lot. So are you, but at least you’ve figured out what seat in the Empire’s worth aspiring to. And it’s yours, so now all you have to do is defend it.

“How long you gonna take?” you ask Dol, changing the subject yet again.

“As long as it takes.” She lets the silence spin out, punctuated only by your hisses as she sews. “Perhaps fifteen minutes.”

You grunt. “Get my palmtop, then. I ain’t got time to waste.”

You’re surprised, when she actually does as you order; you figured what with her actually deigning to talk to you, she was done with the whole slavery thing. Still, she drops your palmtop in front of you and washes her hands while you lever your good arm in front of you to pick it up. It doesn’t feel like you’re pulling on the stitches, so you fumble one-handed with it until you can check in on your security while Dol finishes up.

Spin never came back. You hadn’t expected her to. She’s burning every bridge between you, though, which means that she expected you to die - and you would have, had Dol not come to your aid. Whatever she’d done with Ulixes wouldn’t have been discovered until your body had, and she would have had the time to turn into a ghost.

Now, well, there’s the opportunity to save things.

You know that there aren’t any security cameras in the whole Ulixes base, since the Condesce doesn’t want word of her biggest experiment leaking out across the internet somehow. There’ll be an incident report from that guard that ran off, but you can explain that away. And if you find out what Spin did, you can fix it. She won’t be eager to tell you, but, well. You think the relationship’s run its course, anyway.

You should be filing an incident report of your own. You should be offering up your neck on a platter to the Empress. But you’ve fought too hard to get where you are, to be Her right hand, to let go of it easily.

The next few nights are miserable. Dol is a seething mess who ghosts through the ship and stares daggers at you every time you run into her around a corner. Spin is her usual self, and the only thing that manages to redeem the situation is that at least Dol’s seething keeps her out of Spin’s reach. Well, that, and that things are getting cleaned again. Apparently Dol likes to fix things when she gets mad, and you aren’t complaining.

You’ve never been good at the pressures of waiting, though. Having Spin in the hive, one of her plans weaving together around you, is making you grind your teeth. She won’t drop Ulixes unless it benefits her, and you don’t know what she’s hoping to get out of interrupting things in the first place, which means that foiling her is going to be near-impossible. If you can just hold her off until everything is irrevocably in place, you can at least get by without killing her, but Ulixes is too important for her to fuck up. You’re going to have to kill your kismesis to preserve the Empire’s future if things don’t clear up, and you’re just about ready to punch through a wall with frustration.

She’s just waiting for the last piece to click into place. You hope it never does.

Hope, of course, betrays you. Somehow, in between Dol stalking the ship with a vengeance and Spin being out and about scamming people and setting fire to things, the two of them end up in the same room.  And, of course, neither of them does you a favour and murders the other. They sit together, Dol straight-backed with her arms wrapped around her legs and Spin sprawled out, and you do your best to overhear what they’re saying from the door, and what you hear makes your paranoia seem reasonable. Spin’s obviously getting at Ulixes.

“-psionic training camp,” Dol says, her voice low enough that you can barely catch the words.  “He never talked about it. To me, in any case.” There’s a long silence that makes you wonder if they know you’re there and are messing with you, but then she says, in a choked voice, “He’s been enslaved to the Empire since he was hatched.”

“You’d know what that’s like,” Spin says, and her tone is blithe enough to border on the insensitive.

“I suppose,” Dol says, and wraps her arms tighter around her knees. Neither of them have noticed you’re peering around the door, and your knuckles are white with how tightly you’re gripping the doorjamb. Any moment, they’re going to turn and see you, but if you move before then you’ll be a step behind Spin. “I always had the option of leaving the caverns.”

“You’re the Dolorosa,” Spin says, and to your surprise her voice is scornful. “Why are you convinced you don’t have options now?” You dart out of sight of the door when she turns to get into Dol’s personal space, but the good thing about Spin is that she doesn’t understand the concept of talking quietly. “You can always walk another path.”

“What do you want from me?” Dol says, suspicious to her bones. You almost want to cheer.

“From you?” Spin says, a perfect blend of outrage and surprise in her voice. “I want to-”

“I may be enslaved and occasionally insane, but I am not stupid.” You long to look around the door again and see the expression on Spin’s face, but you have to reluctantly admit that it wouldn’t be worth it. “If you’re proposing a joint venture, you want something from me. Make your offer.”

“I can take you to him,” Spin says, and everything goes dead silent. You have to press a hand over your mouth to keep from yelling, ‘WHAT,’ at the top of your lungs, and you suspect Dol’s not far behind. How does she know where Ulixes is being kept? If she knows, why hasn’t she gone already?

“Disciple,” Dol says, hoarse with the effort of not crying. “What about-”

“Her too,” Spin says, flippant as if she hasn’t just dropped a bombshell. “But I suspect that that isn’t what you’d prefer.”

“Why?” Dol asks, enough of a whisper that you only just catch it.

Spin doesn’t answer. After a long time of neither of them talking, you sneak back down to your room, before either of them can catch you at eavesdropping.

--

You’re on tenterhooks after that, to the point that maintaining a facade of unknowingness is all but impossible. You could go for the obvious method of ending the plot and kill Spin, but if there’s a way out of this that keeps your idiotic, glory-chasing kismesis alive, you want to follow it. And you’ve come to realise that she’ll chase Dol down through land and sea, because Dol is the linchpin she’s waiting on. So you cook, and pin Spin against walls, and exchange cool conversation with Dol, and every atom of you vibrates with the effort of being ready for anything.

Spin goes out, one night, and you relax then. Your base security, which you haven’t been able to change since it’d alert the two of them, tracks Dol as a matter of course, and keeps her in unless she has permission to go out. There’s still the chance that Spin might bomb your hive or something equally ridiculous, but you’re pretty sure Dol won’t be escaping on her own.

You cook, and eat with her in silence. She cleans up the lounge area, which Spin decimated. You catch up on your communications, which are half, ‘Snooty Upstart has Cordially Invited you to His Gathering,” and half your temporary replacement whining about how you’ve picked your territory clean. You reply to your replacement first and suggest that he tries actually hunting, then prepare to delete the rest.

Dol comes into the room you use as your office, when you can be bothered, and places down two mugs of hot chocolate before sitting neatly in the chair across from you. Her hands are folded together in her lap, but she doesn’t look nervous, or blank like she used to. Instead, she looks resigned, and that worries you more than the others would have.

“Need me for somefin?” you ask, when she doesn’t say anything.

She meets your eyes, and unbeknown to her, starts rubbing her thumbs together. Given that she’d shown absolutely no compunctions about beating you half to death, you’re worried about whatever it is that she’s worried about dumping on you - probably that she’s decided to start stepping out with Spin, you think, and take a gulp of the chocolate to try to cope with the idea. Her slave bracelet falls down her wrist and she pushes it back up before drawing a breath.

“I’m leaving,” she says.

You stare at her. You hadn’t expected her to actually come out and tell you, but then again, you don’t think she realises what you’d do to keep Ulixes safe.

“You are self-obsessed, entitled and dismissive,” she says, uneasily twisting the bracelet around her wrist now, “but, somehow, you have also been kind. I am not who I was when I came here, and I am glad of that.”

“An’ if I don’t want you to leave?” you ask, somehow keeping your voice light. Self-obsessed? Dismissive?

Oddly enough, this calms her. Her hands settle and she looks at her lap, a small smile on her lips. It’s not mocking, perhaps the first real smile you’ve seen out of her, and all you can think of is how tired she looks. “I am going to find my son’s body and bury it, Dualscar. I assume that afterwards, I’ll be burying myself. You certainly don’t want me coming back.”

“I could stop you from goin’,” you point out. Your stomach is twisting itself in knots. You’re going to have to stop her, and stop Spin. You thought you’d have more time before Spin changed Dol’s mind. You thought Dol would have more sense. You had even hoped, vainly, Spin would have more sense. “Dol, you know how much a’ the Empire’s future is riding on him.”

She looks at you and says nothing. Your fin throbs, despite the fact that it closed up a week ago.

“Everyone,” you try, gamely. “We’re goin’ to need space colonisation in the next couple hundred a’ sweeps, or everyone’s goin’ to have to start gettin’ reel friendly.”

She continues to say nothing. Sweat drips down the back of your neck. Her saying nothing was almost less creepy when she was locked in her own head. Now, her silence is aimed, and it is making you itch.

“What about the other one - your daughter?” you hastily amend. “She’ll get killed for you wantin’ to go out with a bang. You were just sayin’ to me that you didn’t want revenge, that it’d cause more trouble than it’s worth for you an’ yours.”

“You’re right,” Dol says, and you shift in your seat. Dol agreeing with you is a bad sign. “I don’t want revenge. I want to finish this, and then I want to rest.” She wraps her arms around herself, under the gauze of her shawl, and her gaze turns inwards, distant. “Disciple would be supporting me with every step, if she were here. If death is the only reprieve left to Psiionic, now, death it will be.”

Using the only avenue left to you, you reach over and place a hand on her shoulder, hoping that the time you’ve spent coaxing her back to herself has bought you some goodwill. “Let him go, Dol. It’s already fuckin’ over, just let it go,” you say, and then shut up before you can talk your last hope into the dirt.

She follows the line of your arm with her eyes, through to looking you full in the face, and you know you’ve already lost. “And what did he say?” she asks. You flinch at the razor edge to her words. “Just how closely were you involved with Project Ulixes, Orphaner?”

Your words dry up in your mouth. A repeat of your brawl is hardly something you’re hoping to incite, especially with Spin around. With your luck, she’d take it as an opportunity to drown you in blackmail and skip off arm-in-arm with Dol to ruin the Empire.

“I thought so,” Dol says softly, and reaches up to place her hand over yours. You flinch again, expecting broken fingers, the skin of your palm still tender, but all she does is squeeze your hand lightly before letting go. “I don’t know what lies you’ve been told to make you able to think of us as tools,” she says, standing up, “but my son has served as the Empire’s hammer enough.”

You stand, too, and wipe the sweat off your forehead. You’re not going to want your vision impaired if this comes down to another fight, given that you’re starting at a disadvantage. A pity you can’t pull Ahab’s without warning. “I can’t let you go, Dol.”

“I know,” she says, and tucks her shawl closer around her shoulders. “You may want to sit down.”

“What?” you rasp out, before your vision goes funny and your knees buckle under you, tripping you into the desk on your way down. If you hadn’t already done so, you’d want to smack yourself again anyway. “Choc’late.”

The next thing you know, her hand is pressed against your head, two fingers holding one of your eyes open, and you can’t remember the intervening moments. Gravity drags at you, pulling you down into the black, and the last thing you hear is, “You’ll wake up again.”

Despite everything, you think she’s telling the truth.

--

The first thing you do when you wake up is shove yourself up on your knees and make yourself sick up. From how quickly it knocked you out, you’re guessing whatever Dol put in your drink - idiot, you don’t know how the troll that likely wants you dead more than any other managed to get past your perfectly reasonable paranoia - would have all gotten into your system already, but better safe than sorry. That done, you wobble your way to the kitchen and rinse your mouth out before fumbling at your pocket for your palmtop.

It’s only been three hours.

You let your arm drop to your side and attempt to pull your thoughts together. Item One: It’s been a while since that went down, enough that Spin managed to get Dol out of the hive and they’ve long since absconded. Item Two: Your neck is on the line if Project Ulixes is sabotaged. Item Three: They’re going to sabotage the shit out of Project Ulixes. Conclusion: You’re fucked.

Well. You know where Ulixes is in the maze that is Empire R&D, and you have access, which is more than Spin can say. Maybe you’ll be lucky and they won’t have gotten in yet, or they got caught. Either way, you’re still fucked, just maybe not as fucked.

You splash water on your face and stumble on your way. You still have one chance, if you’re fast.

--

Empire Research and Development is more like a suburb than a series of labs, easily accessible by land and water alike, since a significant percentage of the enlisted scienterrorists have fins - not always ones they started out having, either. You splap your way up one of the access ramps and wring yourself out instead of heading through one of the dryers. For all that people here work all hours, you’re not going to give away any signs of your presence, and dripping all over the place is still more innocuous than a giant, whirring fan going off.

You cut through to the building the entrance to Ulixes’ domain is housed in, a nondescript warehouse repurposed with labs that have never, to your knowledge, been used. The whole thing is a front for what takes place underground, and while you were working, there were hundreds of trolls whose only job was ‘occasionally walk into the warehouse, pick something up, and take it to another warehouse.’ All grunts, and all probably dead now so they can’t betray the strangeness of what’s been going on under their noses. And somehow Spin has still managed to follow a trail here.

Not wanting to ruin all your hard work in getting here hopefully unnoticed, you take the stairs instead of the elevator, walking as quietly as you know how. The security on the door to Ulixes’ hangar is the best any of Her Condescension’s stable of techs could come up with, which means that even if Spin does know where Ulixes is, which is a long shot in the first place, she’ll still be outside. You still hope against hope that she and Dol are still wandering around the R&D grounds; their punishment is going to be a lot kinder if they aren’t near the most secret of the Empire’s secrets.

Of course, you have no such luck.

The stairs lead straight into the hallway, the better to be herded should something go wrong. It means you can’t hide on the approach, but neither can Spin and Dol at the end of the hall, down by the doors. Spin’s slouching against the wall, fiddling with something you can’t see, and Dol is facing the door, one hand placed on the metal. It looks vast, surrounding her. Or she looks small, surrounded.

Two on one is shitty odds, especially when one of them can snap you in half without breaking a sweat and the other is Spinneret Mindfang, but you have no intention of getting into a fistfight again. This is duty, culling, and you know how to carry it out. Ahab’s is set on a thin, low-power beam – you don’t want it destroying the facilities, after all – and it materialises in your hands with a weight to it that seems heavier than normal. You bring it to your shoulder regardless. At this distance, you don’t have to sight down the barrel, but you do so anyway as you carefully advance down the hall.

At the first sound of a footfall, Spin looks up. Dol doesn’t.

“You can still walk away, Spin,” you say, stopping far enough away that she can’t lunge at you, close enough that you barely have to raise your voice. You don’t include Dol in the conversation, because it seems pretty obvious that she’s not listening. “Leave, an’ we ain’t gotta do this.”

Spin raises her hands and at first you think you’ve succeeded, but then you see the spots of blue held between her fingers. Your finger is around the trigger so fast that you almost sprain it. You and Spin aren’t well-matched in a fight – you’re a long-range kind of guy, while she’s an all-rounder strong on the up close and personal – and to win, you’re going to have to end things before she can play to her strengths.

You pull the trigger. In the aftermath of the roaring light, you hear dice clattering on the concrete floor.

Mindfang is a shadow in your vision, still screaming and distorted at the light of Ahab’s, and she whips around the scorchmark you left in the wall, something blue in her hands that you can’t make out. Working on instinct, not daring to blink, you wrap your hand in part of your still-damp cape and grab Ahab’s barrel with it, angling the rifle across your body in a quarterstaff block, and shove.

Thanks to your good instincts, her sword bites into Ahab’s instead of into you. Hopefully it’s not deep enough to actually damage anything, but since nothing’s exploded, you take the opportunity to twist the gun while she’s still off balance, yanking the sword out of her hands. Before she can snatch it back, you skip backwards and level Ahab’s at her again, flicking the beam scatter up a bit. Your next shot won’t miss - can’t miss.

“Stop,” Dol says, turning from the door for the first time.

You hesitate a moment, but Mindfang doesn’t, and that’s all it takes. She kicks one of her dice into a re-roll and the sword stuck in Ahab’s glows white before clattering to the ground as two daggers. You whip Ahab’s down, but Mindfang’s already dived for the daggers, and she rolls as she picks them up to sweep your legs out from under you. You go down hard, Ahab’s bouncing out of your hands, and then Mindfang plants a dagger in the meaty part of your arm before you can push yourself away.

“Stop!” Dol yells, and this time Mindfang freezes, her hand still around the hilt of the dagger. You try to not move too much. Luckily, you’ve got enough adrenaline running through you that you didn’t scream embarrassingly at the stab, but you’re starting to feel it now. One day, you’re going to find out why women keep stabbing you, so that it doesn’t fucking happen again.

“We’re kind of in the middle of something here,” Spin says, and gestures with the other dagger.

Dol folds her hands together. “Dualscar, open the door.”

You let your head fall back on the concrete, whacking your horns in the process. “You gotta be fuckin’ kiddin’ me.”

She walks over and crouches down by your head, waving Spin away. It’d almost be worth seeing the indignant look on Spin’s face, if you weren’t in the situation you’re all in. This isn’t going to end well. Right now, it looks like it’s not going to end well for you, although that could be true of any outcome that isn’t convincing them to agree with you and then going out for ice cream and stitches.

“I want to believe in you.” She sweeps your damp hair away from your eyes and you blink up at her, confused. “My son believed that everyone had something about them that was good. Something small, in some cases. Something hidden. But always, the potential.”

“Dol,” you say.

“My other son is behind those doors.” She has to stop and press her lips together for a moment. “What’s left of him is behind those doors. How much did he scream and beg, as you took his life from him inches at a time?”

You look away, weary. This is not going to end well for you, specifically. “He’d been sentenced to treason, Dol. It’s a death sentence, an’ at least this way he’s actually doin’ some good. It’s as right as it can be.”

“You don’t believe that.” She resettles herself, from crouching to kneeling, as if she trusts you to not attack her. You still could, even with your arm stabbed through. “You know my sentence, and you’ve still shown me kindnesses that you never had to.”

“You’re not going to convince him,” Spin says, something like pity in her voice. You resist the urge to roll your eyes. “Psiionic is only a job to him. Not a troll, and certainly not someone deserving of mercy.”

“I’m so sick of this,” Dol says, in a whisper that you think only you can hear. She closes her eyes and bows her head over you. “I’m so sick of having to look over my shoulder, and hurt.”

“You wanna go, I’ll let you,” you say, before you quite feel the words forming. One last, desperate attempt to avert this. “Just not this, Dol.”

“I can’t,” she says in less than a whisper, and wraps her arms around herself. At the blank look in her eyes, you push yourself up on your good elbow, but it’s too late.

“You don’t gotta do anything,” you say, firmly as you can. “Dol?”

“What?” Spin says, from across the hall. When Dol doesn’t answer, she stalks towards the two of you, saying, “Look, I can only do so much about the guard patrols,” and puts her hand on Dol’s shoulder.

Dol howls. It’s the only word for the pained battlecry that comes out of her as she throws herself at Spin. You use the distraction and haul yourself backwards with your good arm, not wanting to stand in case it draws their attention. You’re somewhat better prepared for this, having seen her flip out twice before. Spin never thinks that pushing too hard can snap, and that broken edges are the sharpest.

Dol actually fighting Spin might have worked out well for you – they’re fairly closely matched, you think; you certainly wouldn’t want to bet on the outcome – but of course, you’re not that lucky. Dol swipes enough at Spin that she backs away, then goes straight to the door and presses her back into it. When Spin tries to follow, she snarls and lashes out, making it impossible for anyone to get within arm’s reach. Like she’s guarding it, like she tried to guard her other son.

“But I’m on your side,” Spin says, more affronted than anything. All she gets back is intense focus, and Dol shifting into a better position to lunge if she needs to.

You climb to your feet, nursing your arm. “Give it up, Spin,” you say, cautiously stepping closer. “You ain’t gonna logic someone in battle-shock.”

“I wouldn’t have to if you’d just done what she asked.” Spin flicks her hair over her shoulder in annoyance, and you take the opportunity to edge closer. “I get that you’re all rah-rah-for-the-Empire, but does this one thing really matter in the long run?”

“Are you kiddin’ me?” you ask, temporarily distracted from your mission of getting close enough that you might be able to punch at least one of them in the face, probably Spin. “This is fuckin’ pivotal for the advancement a’ the Empire – it’s space colonisation, Spin!”

“Pivotal,” she says, and looks away. “Yes, I suppose it is.”

“Right,” you say, and then modulate your tone a little as you turn to Dol. “Dol? I know Spin’s a raging bitch, but I need you to come back to me. We’re goin’ to get out a’ here.” She faces you a little, and you edge forward a little more. This close, you can see the sweat beading on her forehead. “Come on,” you say, gentling your tone a little more. This could still work out for you, if you can just convince Dol to leave Spin in the dust. “You know I ain’t keen to get in a fight with you again.”

“She’s not a barkbeast, Dualscar,” Spin says, stepping closer and crowding everyone in. You raise your good arm to bar her path and stop her from crowding too much, since you’ve actually brought people back from this particular edge, and apparently Spin ditches someone the instant they’re not useful to her. “She-”

“Shut the fuck up,” you say to her softly. “You lost.” Raising your voice just a little, you turn your attention back to Dol. “We can leave, Dol. You ain’t gotta do anything, you had enough a’ death, I get that. You just gotta leave with me. We’ll go somewhere safe.”

“I can’t,” she whispers, and then licks her lips. You take it as a good sign, considering that getting words out of her is harder than getting blood from stone. She still doesn’t look at you, though. She does wrap her arms around herself, squeezing her biceps until her knuckles go white. It’s not a very defensible position, so you think that maybe, on some level, she can tell you don’t mean her harm. You’d think she was repaying the favour, except that she’s shaking so hard she probably needs her hands to keep herself together.

“I’m not makin’ you,” you insist, acutely aware that every second that passes makes that more and more likely to be a lie. You can only explain away so much, when you’re stuck at the door to a top-secret project with two civilians - one of whom needs to see the inside of a cell, and the other barely avoiding going back. You stretch out a hand in the hope of speeding the process up a bit, carefully not touching her because you don’t want to get your face clawed off.  “Dol, I need you to talk to me. You know where you are, yeah?”

She looks up with a sharp jerk of her chin, meeting your eyes, and only then do you see the tension in her jaw, the way one of her fangs is digging into her bottom lip painfully. You reach a little closer without thinking and she slaps your hand away with a smack that rings down the corridor. “Watching highbloods march my son to death again,” she hisses. “I- I won’t- I can’t-”

“It’s alright,” you soothe her. “It ain’t gonna happen, you just gotta-” Before she can knock you away again, you quickly reach up with both hands, the stab wound in your arm screaming, and bury them in her hair. She shrieks and grabs at your arms, but it’s the work of a moment to find her hornbeds and apply pressure, with the kind of ease that practice on ferals shortly to be sans lusus gives you. “Shoosh,” you tell her, and watch her eyes go half-lidded, the panic in them dying. “It’ll be-”

Spin slices you down your back.

It takes a moment, and then pain spirals out from the cut, setting off the wound in your shoulder. You try to turn, to confront Spin, but what actually happens is that you fall to your knees and distantly regret your decision that your armour was too heavy to swim long-distance with.

“Finally,” Spin says, and grabs your arm. You try to pull away, but between your shoulder and the fact that you’re leaking blood like you’re at a subjugglator party, you’re so much meat. When she hauls on your arm, dragging you over to the door, you manage to scream. You can feel the two sides of the cut gaping open, and it is deeper than you are entirely happy with. Worse, you think it’s gone through one of your gills.

“Spin,” you manage to gasp out, between breaths that are coming ragged for no good reason. Dol has flattened herself against the door, her eyes wide and mouth parted in shock, and you can’t imagine that you getting shredded in front of her did much good for that. Rescue is unlikely to be forthcoming from that quarter.

She slaps your hand over the palm scanner beside the door, which opens with a near-silent hydraulic whirr. Dol stumbles to her knees beside you, looking out at what you know is one of the most intimidating sights you’ve ever seen.

All you can see is the catwalk, but beyond it is the largest chasm you’ve ever seen, natural underwater formations included. It doesn’t look like much, until you realise that it’s fifty kilometres long, twenty tall, and full of the first and foremost weapon of the Alternian Empire made for deep space.

The Battleship Condescension isn’t functional, yet. Right now, your blood leaking out of you and leaving you too dizzy to save it from Spin, you can sympathise with it.

“Spin,” you croak out before she can cross through, entirely unconcerned by the fact that your lips are going numb.

She stops and rests a hand on your head. “I am sorry, Dualscar.”

“Why?” you manage.

She actually pauses. You wish you could see the expression on her face more clearly, but given that you left a smear of blood as she dragged you, you don’t think that’s going to happen. “For the future, like you.” she says, after a long period you assume she is using to decide on which version of the truth she owes you based on blood lost. “I’m just better at it.”

“Why Dol?” You fist the hand that she’s not holding against the reader in her coat, sending a fresh wave of pain across your back. It’s that that convinces you you’re beaten - you couldn’t hold Ahab’s if you tried, and you’re pretty sure that grabbing Spin’s coat won’t work as a deterrent forever. Dol’s still not doing anything, kneeling as she tries to comprehend the Battleship Condescension, so you’re probably going to die of not being able to stitch up your own back and slowly leaking out blood; you figure you deserve to know Spin’s plans before you cark it.

She bends down and pries your fingers off, one by one. Under the mask of her hair, a barrier isolating the two of you. “Because it was fun,” she says, and wraps her hand around your fingers, squeezing. The pain is nothing, compared to everything else, but it still hurts. “Because I have a long, long life to prepare for and I’ll use anything I have at hand to make it easier. And because I know what I have to do to win, while you’ve always tried to win with what you have.” She presses her lips to your forehead. “It was a fun game, Dualscar. Don’t be a sore loser.”

You let your hand drop. “Fuck off, then, Spin. For all the fuckin’ good it’ll do you.”

She straightens, still holding your hand in place over the reader. It’s going to time out and send an alert in a moment, and you don’t even know if you want it to or not, now. If Spin’s going to get away with her plan, you’d rather it not be discovered until after you’re dead.

“Are you coming?” she asks Dol. When she doesn’t get an answer, she shakes her head and steps over the threshold of the doorway, then finally drops your hand.

“Why

ain’t

you running off?” you ask her, across the table. With all the blood washed off and everything bandaged, you’re more weary than hurting, although your fin still throbs like a bitch. You can’t exactly bandage it, and you couldn’t bring yourself to stitch the tear together after giving the rest of you a run-down, so you’re stuck with keeping half your face incredibly still until it heals. As such, you are currently shoveling as much food as you can hold into your stomach, in the hope that replenishing your resources means you’ll mend faster.

Dol nurses a cup of coffee, her food untouched. She lets your question hang just long enough for it to get awkward, then says, “Where would I go?” and resettles her fingers around her mug.

“You had a cult,” you point out. “I ain’t happy about how all a’ you managed to evade every piece a’ security we got, but it should mean that they got places to hide you, if you went.”

It’s something else, sitting with her like this. Watching her think, instead of watching your words slide off her like she’s glass. If you’d known that taking a beating was all you needed to get Dol to talk to you, you’d have done it weeks ago.

“Spinneret,” she says, the word awkward in her mouth. “You love her.”

You freeze with your fork halfway to your mouth, then nod.

“If we had captured her and determined that she was a spy,” she starts, and her mouth crooks up a little in one corner. “If we executed her, and you knew there was no hope that you would ever love again. Would you care where you went, after that?”

You set down your fork. “I’d want revenge,” you say, slowly, wondering if this is the danger to the Empire that Spin’s set in motion. “I wouldn’t fuckin’ lie down and wait to die.”

“I would,” she says, her voice light and unreadable, and takes a sip of her coffee. “Apparently.”

“Just sayin’,” you mutter, fin aching, and pick up your fork again so that you don’t have to look at her. “Fuckin’ shell, Dol, did you beat me half to death because you wanted to get culled? There are easier ways a’ toppin’ yourself!”

You can tell you’ve made a mistake as soon as the words leave your mouth from the sour expression that she gets, although you wish you knew what that mistake was. She drains the rest of her coffee in a single gulp and sets it down with a click that echoes through the kitchen, before pushing back her chair and standing up.

“Dol!” you snap, and nod back to her chair.

Instead of sitting down again, she simply leans on the chair, her knuckles going white from how tightly her hands clench down on it. “My son,” she says, and you don’t think she’s talking about the one you’ve met, “taught me many things; chief amongst them was kindness at all costs, which I often regret.” She pauses to collect herself and relaxes her hands, inch by fractious inch. “I wish you would cull me. I will happily hit you until you feel you have reason enough, and then perhaps I could finally find some peace. But if you damage my credibility as an example of the Empire’s vicious cruelty to those who oppose it, her Condescension will destroy you in my stead.”

You gape at her.

“My other son was taken,” her lips twist wryly into something that should look like a smile, but doesn’t, “for the good of the Empire. My daughter managed an escape, and the less I know about that, the better. As long as I live, this punishment falls on my shoulders, not theirs, and it is perhaps the last thing I can do for them.”

Your appetite gone, you push your plate away. All the work you’ve done, becoming an asset of the Empire and of Her Imperious Condescension herself, and you almost threw it all away. “I ain’t goin’ to cull you,” you say, your mouth so dry the words barely come out.

Dol sighs and straightens her shoulders, her burden resettled. “You’ll forgive me for not thanking you.”

“Fuck,” you say, and stare unseeing at your hands. “Dol, you ain’t meant to know even as much as you do, on Project Ulixes.”

“Whip me,” she says, her voice a sneer better than any jumped-up blueblood’s.

Your patience snaps and you stand up to go eye-to-eye with her, your chair scraping an ugly sound in the silence. “Maybe I should,” you hiss, for all that you know it wouldn’t do any good - might even make her more sympathetic to Spin and Spin’s digging, the next time Spin comes around. “You got knowledge you weren’t meant to, I can’t have you gettin’ all kinds of initiative-”

She picks up one of your plates - one of your good plates, they were handmade for the Court and the maker died before Dol was even hatched, you’re sure - holds it for a moment, and then throws it to the ground, where it shatters into irrecoverable shards. For a moment - and oh, you are watching - her eyes go wide as if she’s taken in as much disbelief as you at what she did, but then her mouth goes into a tight line and she dusts off her hands in deliberate satisfaction. “I will exercise as much initiative as I have left to me,” she says, and finally meets your eyes. “You’re welcome to try to stop me, of course.”

Your ribs hurt, your fin hurts, your ego hurts, and you have been so thoroughly trounced that your entire line should be ashamed of you. Fuck you for ever thinking that Spin was a danger to you.

--

“Look,” you say, leaning on Dol’s door. You’ve calmed down some, pacing your cabin until you can almost see the rut in the floorboards. Now you’re back to your usual charming self, or close enough to count, and at the very least you can hold a civil fuckin’ conversation. “There ain’t any reason we can’t be-” the word friendly curdles on your tongue, because when it comes down to it, she’s a landdweller and you’re a seadweller and ne’er the twain shall meet, “-courteous, about this.”

“Courteous,” she says, dryly.

You refuse to take the bait, since getting into a sarcasm duel with her is all you need to round off your beating, at the moment. “So maybe I said it badly before,” you say, and shrug. You don’t think you did, but you obviously set her off somehow. “Dol, you’re probably one a’ three people alive that knows anyfin about Project Ulixes now, an’ it needs to stay that way.”

She crosses to the lone porthole of her room, putting her back to you in a flagrant display of disregard. “What do you want, Dualscar?” Without being able to see her face, you’re devoid of all the clues you’ve worked so hard to get, and it feels like you’re about to miss a step. “Courteously, if you must.”

“Stay as my slave,” you say. When she doesn’t respond, you add, “Yeah, I get it, your kids - but I ain’t keen to send you away now, and I got appearances to keep. Stay on an’ act like a coddamn slave when you’re meant to, an’ you’ll have as much freedom as I can give.”

“And?” she asks, her voice barely inflected enough to make it a question.

“And - what?” you demand. “What else can I do for you? You’ve got Orphaner fuckin’ Dualscar twisted around your fuckin’ fingers, so if you want something-”

She turns then, in a whirl of skirts, and you flinch back before catching yourself. On her face is the same grief as when you taunted her with the judgement of her children, but sharpened into a rage, and at that look you realise it’s a wonder you still have intestines. “If I want something?” she says, and stalks across the intervening space between you. You think that perhaps you might have fucked up again. “I want this entire world to understand the disservices it has done itself in destroying the last vestiges of selfless compassion it had.” At your blank, uncomprehending look, she leans further in and says in hard, intent tones, barely loud enough to make it between the two of you, “I want the world to know that they will never have any better, and that they can only blame themselves. I want Condesce to realise that she has the blood of a kinder future on her hands, and I want her to weep, Dualscar. Do you think you can give me that?”

“Shit,” you breathe out, the word leaving your lips without consulting your brain. You can see why the philosophy would have appealed to followers of an off-spectrum mutant; wrong in some way themselves, or simply low enough to not be worth putting extra resources into over the thirty sweeps they might be alive, the idea of someone coming along and being weak-hearted enough to haul them out of their misery would be a compelling fantasy indeed. “Dol, you can’t fuckin’ blame everyone, it’s just reality-”

“Reality is that my son threatened the Alternian Empire enough to cause the largest public backlash since the limeblood executions,” she hisses. “With nothing more than an outstretched hand. With nothing more than kindness. But feel free to explain how unreasonable I’m being, Dualscar, and how there was no motive other than the furtherance of the status quo; I’ve certainly never heard it before.” She stares at you for a second, unbreakable and cold, and then her shoulders sag and she steps away, turning back to the porthole. “What could you possibly offer me now?”

You breathe again, the broken moment hitting you like a sledgehammer. Leaving Dolorosa alive was almost certainly a mistake, but it’s on the orders of the one person in the entire Empire you can’t countermand, cannot even question. Finally, you manage to push out, “You said you didn’t want revenge.”

“I don’t,” she says, still not looking at you. “I want vengeance. I want justice. It doesn’t- it shouldn’t come from me.”

“Where from, then?” you ask, and fold your arms, only to regret it when your own hand jabs you in a bruise or two. “An’ how? You want us all to die, or what?”

“If I wanted you dead, you would be dead,” she says, a simple statement of fact that you can’t disagree with. Sure, she’d then be executed in some strange and exciting way, given your blood and even being an example of the Empire doesn’t grant you a pardon for that murder, but it wouldn’t make you any less dead. “It comes from everyone. From anyone who heard his words and remembers them, and passes them on, and anyone who hears them in ten sweeps or twenty. Anyone who can look at the world and see that it isn’t working.” She taps her nails on the rim of the porthole before facing you again. “Why do you want me to stay?”

“The world’s workin’,” you insist, dodging the question. “Everyone gets fed an’ a roof, an’ if they want more they have to make themshellves useful to someone.”

“It’s strange,” she says, her voice perfectly level, her face absolute calm, “that you think society taking its members, killing them, and strapping their remains into engines is society working. Why do you want me to stay?”

“I already said,” you say, throwing your hands up in despair. Now all you can do is try to throw her off-course, feed her false information to give to Spin. You need to know what Spin wants before you can counter her, and for that you need time. “I need someone lookin’ after everythin’! An’ you’re already here, an’ you don’t seem intent on krillin’ me, an’ watchin’ Spin runnin’ into a brick wall with you is entertainin’.”

One of her eyebrows rises in a perfect arch. “Did you ever contemplate the possibility that I have no desire to be your entertainment?”

You watch her a moment, shake your head, wince when it jars your fin, and leave. Whoever it was that said jades are all fuckin’ insane was right.

--

When Spin comes back, she looks at your fading bruises and the tear in your fin that Dol condescended to stitch up, looks at your hive, which has returned to a state of lived in that suggests nobody is cleaning it fanatically any longer, looks at perfect Dol with not a hair out of place, and starts laughing so hard she actually cries.

You push her off the ship and go inside, leaving her to fish herself out.

When she makes her way back up and through to your room, she’s wrapped in a monstrosity of a green towel from armpit to knee, her hair loosely twisted together and pulled over one shoulder. She uses the interim in which your eyebrows are rising - she has her own towels - to lean over your shoulder and look at the screen of your husktop.

“Hopin’ I’m trollin’ someone you haven’t tried for access to Ulixes yet?” you ask, suddenly bone-sick of the charade, and push her away so she stops dripping on you.

“Are you?” she asks, and shoves you over until she can sit beside you on your seat.

“Yeah, I do all a’ my top-seacret conversin’ from home,” you say, and slide an arm around her waist. If she tries to shove you off the chair as revenge for her dousing, she’ll be coming too. “What are you doin’ back?”

“Irons, fires,” she says, dismissively. “Maybe I missed you.”

“Fuckin’ ha,” you grouse. “Any chance a’ you just droppin’ whatever you’re doin’ with Ulixes, Spin?” When she doesn’t reply, you add, tentatively, “I don’t fancy havin’ to haul you in, an’ this is bigger than your usual knock-over-an’-run jobs. I don’t fin you get how much bigger.”

She leans on her elbows and looks at your husktop, her eyes half-lidded and all of her usual bravado gone. She doesn’t look like Marquise Spinneret Mindfang without it; just a scarred-up, tired blueblood who’s been fighting as long as you know her. “One chance,” she says, and slowly folds until she’s resting her head on her arms, looking up at you. Her hair unwinds and falls over her shoulders, masking her mouth, and your hand itches to smooth it away. She’d probably bite you if you tried. “But between you and me, I don’t think I’m going to fail.”

You should ask why this matters to her so much. You should ask what she wants. You should do that, and offer it to her wrapped up with a bow, and you won’t, because she would never accept it. Not from you, and, you think, not from anyone. Whatever drives her is furious, and single-minded, and has written her path out in stone long before she ever met you.

You give in, then, and reach out to tuck her hair back behind her ear. To your astonishment, she closes her eyes and lets you.

--

Dolorosa is rattling around the kitchen when you crawl out from under Spin’s mass of slime-ridden hair in the evening. You look askance at the food she’s eating when you sit across from her and say, “Tryin’ to poison me?”

“Only if you intend to eat my corpse,” she says, not looking at you as she neatly dissects her meal. “You made it very clear that you cook for yourself, so I didn’t bother.”

“Good,” you say, and sadly wish to yourself that someone would make you a meal once in a while. You need a proper matesprit, not just flings that inevitably end in their moirail deciding that someone quadranted to the Empire can’t possibly work long-term. “Very effishent. Look, Dol, about you leavin’...”

She sighs and sets down her cutlery. “I’m still here, am I not? As long as I am here, my daughter remains free in exile. If I leave, my punishment falls on her head. I will endure more than your inept insults to not let that happen, I assure you.”

“Yeah, an’ your asshoreance is worth a lot, ain’t it,” you say, leaning back in your chair. “Fact is, Dol, I can’t be shore you ain’t gonna cut my throat in my sleep, so you leavin’ might be an idea after all.” Her leaving, and with her, any chance Spin has of worming more information on Ulixes out of you. It looks like Spin’s set on her course of action, and you want it as far from you as possible. “We both know you would, so don’t bother denyin’ it.”

Her hands tremble, just a little. You would have missed it, were you not paying attention. “When I thought Psiionic might have been rescued, perhaps. Now...” She looks down at her hands and balls them into fists, startled at their shaking. “I would rather that we came to some arrangement.”

You lean on one hand and look at her, considering. It seems to fit with what you’ve figured out of her, of her calculated viciousness and her overarching credo of doing best by her children. You have no doubt that she can lie, but she seems to prefer being blunt. And if you can win her loyalty, you’ll have a powerful tool. “Alright,” you say, slowly. “Convince me.”

“Convince you?” she hisses. You nearly roll your eyes - she’s angry, again, real convincing - but then you notice that her hands are shaking despite being in white-knuckle fists, her teeth tightly closed before she spits out, “I was in a cell barely tall enough to stand in, barely wide enough to lie in, and all through the evening at random intervals someone would play my son’s screams, or flood the cell with smoke and let me beat my hands bloody on the walls for hours.” With an effort, she unbends her hands and lays them flat on the table, pressing down as if to try to force them through the wood. “I have endured worse than waiting on some spoiled, clueless highblood to protect those I care for, and I would do it again. Does that convince you?”

You think of the flat, emotionless woman that you first met and reach for her hand. “Dol...”

“Don’t!” she snaps, but freezes before she can draw her hand back. As her eyes dart up to look over your shoulder, your hand brushes hers, and you helplessly note how warm her fingers are before pulling away.

“Am I interrupting?” Mindfang asks, and you can just hear the smug grin.

“Fuck off,” you bite, as Dol folds her hands under her arms and gets a slightly distant look to her eyes. Everything has been fucked up forever, as far as you can tell. “Quit poachin’ my crew, Spin.”

 “Oh, Dualscar,” she says, trailing her fingers along the back of your neck as she walks around you to take a seat. “I might just have to steal this one from you.”

We've got obsessions I want to wipe out all the sad ideas that come to me when I am holding you We've got obsessions All you ever think about are sick ideas involving me, involving you

—

The lot of you have a thousand empty hours, waiting for the other shoe to drop. It gets to you, sometimes. You can reach out and touch walls, now, dig your feet into whatever floor you’re standing on, eat and sleep if you want - but there’s still not much difference between your hive and the bottom of the ocean, when it comes to being left alone with the inside of your head.

It was a little easier, before. You could detach from yourself. Now, you wake up sweating, convinced that everything that has happened is some sick dream. It never got any more fun, waking up from a dream that you weren’t you, returning to a bundle of fucked-up and quiet, accepting self-loathing.

You don’t sleep much.

Suf doesn’t really notice; he’s too used to odd hours, and you’d think he didn’t sleep himself if you hadn’t witnessed his talent of passing out in two minutes on the most uncomfortable surfaces known to trollkind first-hand. Psi doesn’t notice at first, either - their entire band has met the idea of sleeping at a routine time and decided they don’t care much for it. So if you’re up in the early afternoon and one notices, and up after sunrise and the other notices, they shrug and figure you’re sleeping when they do.

Disciple is the one who figures it out. Which is downright humiliating - you know how important she is to Suf and Psi, you know Dol would die for her, but you don’t know her yourself too well. She has the same heart as the rest of them, though, which means when she finds you in the kitchen late morning three nights running - and you’re not trying to invade or anything, it’s just that having people in the place, even asleep, feels more real than sitting alone in your hive and it’s easier to breathe - she drops a blanket on your head.

“We’re in the middle of a fuckin’ desert,” you point out, carefully unhooking the blanket from your horns. You don’t particularly want to explain to Dol how one of her blankets got ripped to shreds.

Disciple sets a cup of tea in front of you before sliding into the chair on the other side of the table. “We are playing cards,” she informs you, and tosses a deck on the table. You’re not entirely sure where she got it from, and you’re not going to ask. “You’re going to want the blanket to cofur your shame after I take you fur everything you have.”

You play cards. She’s not wrong.

When you’re down to your last ring, Disciple holds a finger up to her lips. Before you can be an idiot and ask why she’s keeping you quiet, she gets up without scraping her chair along the floor and beckons for you to follow her. You do, despite a flicker of unease, leaving your blanket on your chair and the shittiest hand known to trollkind on the table.

She leads you down into the cave system, away from your lake and further underground. It’s cold, and dark, and it smells wet even though the walls are dry - you guess that’s your fault. “I know you don’t sleep much,” she says, her voice barely a murmur. “Nobody seems to, and they all think they’re alone.” The two of you come to a fork, and she pauses before leading you down the left one. You follow, increasingly baffled. “Rosa sews. Kar uses sopor, sometimes, but he doesn’t like it, so mostly he just reads and naps a lot. Pol…” She jerks her chin ahead of the two of you, where your branch widens into something less claustrophobic. Now that you’re looking for it, you can feel the crackle of electricity in your horns.

“An’ you?” you ask, looking down at the woman you’ve been underestimating this whole time.

She grins up at you, a flash of teeth in darkness. “I beat douchebags at cards.” Before you can - what, protest? You’re pretty solid on your status of douchebag lately - she sobers. “Rosa gave you the lusus talk. Now I’m giving you the best furrend talk.”

You should have just slept. The daymares would have been much less worrying.

“You’re all acting like you’re alone still,” she says, looking away and shrugging a shoulder. You don’t think she’s given the Best Furrend Talk all that often; Suf’s hardly experienced, and Psi… well, his partners wouldn’t have cared, you’re guessing. Short-term arrangements don’t break your heart. “And I get it, that everything’s new and tentative. But if you don’t try to move forward, you’re never going to be able to help each other. There’s nothing here that we don’t make, so if you don’t try to make something, you’re just going to drift away and hurt each other all over again. You especially.”

“What, becod I ain’t one a’ you?” you protest.

“Yes,” she says, unflinching. “And also because you drift off, when things hurt. You hide at the bottom of the lake, where we can’t find you. And fur people like us, you might as well be wearing your heart on your sleeve. We can tell, Dualscar. We might be the only ones you’ve efur met who care enough to do something about it. Don’t waste it.”

You stare at her, your throat dry. Finally, you manage to eke out, “You are Dol’s fuckin’ spittin’ image.”

She smiles. “If you don’t become worthy of Kar and Pol, I’ll chew you up and spit out your bones. She taught me how.”

Entirely too scared of the last member of the rebel party, you edge into the cave and give Psi the fright of his post-life life.

—

Mindful of Disciple’s advice after that, you start watching people. And now that you’re actually watching, you start noticing things. Spin projects loudness and brashness, a force of personality impossible to ignore, and she hides in plain sight when she’s not talking, as if she’s not even there. The way she looks at her cavalreaper - you can’t watch that; you imagine that you looked like that after her, at one point. Her cavalreaper seems bland, but the way he looks back is iron, and you daresay you don’t need to ask after the story. Dol’s legislacerator is more normal than she seems, building walls out of interminable jargon and terrible colour combinations. Dol throws herself into the building of this place at this time. The Handmaid - the most terrifying troll ever to come up to your armpit - drifts around on aloof, vague mystery.

Dol’s doing her best, as desperately as she can, but you’re hardly going to form a community if things stay this way.

While you’re watching, you get watched. Suf is kind, of course, and you don’t like thinking about that all that much. Every time you do, guilt unfolds in your chest, showing unique facets every time. You - you’re still not sure you want to be kind, to be decent. It’s asking for a shot in the back, it’s difficult, it hurts, and the only reward is being more like the trolls you’ve come reluctantly to admire a little for somehow pulling off kindness without cutting themselves to pieces on the wanting of other people. You can admire them without imitating them, your mind tells you, and it’s too late to change who you are, anyway.

Except it’s a knife, being who you are. It’s the pain that followed you to the bottom of the ocean and kept you there until you turned blank and let yourself go. And every time you think it would be easier not to, you remember the feel of your gun cooling in your hands after taking the shot on Dol. There’s no solution you like here.

Psi watches you like he knows that, flat and baleful. You run into his stares like you’ve run into a door, and he doesn’t even have to say anything. He knows who you are. He saw you at - your worst? Your best? - and he hates you for it, with depths you cannot begin to fathom. Things - things haven’t progressed far with Suf, part because he’s shy and part because you don’t want to ruin this - to ruin him, the existence of something nice even if you’re not sure where you stand on the subject of ‘nice’. Things with Psi… well, he throws himself at you, trying to break himself to splinters on your edges, and you gather that this isn’t an entirely new coping method for him.

You hate him more than you can breathe, sometimes, for being so straightforward about it. You’re just the asshole who hides at the bottom of the lake.

You take up cooking communal meals, ostensibly because you’re the only one in the entire universe who knows your way around a nutritionblock. In reality, it’s mostly because you can feel Disciple watching you not do anything about her advice, and you are a bundle of guilt and overthinking. Partly, it’s just… you enjoy it. You’re allowed to enjoy it. You can like assembling a meal without thinking about repercussions on your essential being, even if everyone else is doing their best to think about it very loudly for you.

Psi corners you three evenings into your newfound hobby, when the novelty has worn off and there aren’t five people hanging around and watching you peel potatoes. You can feel the crackle of power in the air when he walks in - he’s normally considerate enough to keep his psi to himself - and are halfway through the process of turning to give him a hard time when he finishes the job for you by slamming you back against the counter and pushing up in your personal space.

“What?” you snap, and flex your shoulders as subtly as you can. He’s not restraining you, so he’s picking a fight. It’s depressing to know how easily he could dispose of you, if he tried.

“This act is sick,” he snarls, low but intent. Just because nobody else is in the kitchen doesn’t mean that nobody else is nearby; Dol’s hive is always full of people. “I’m sick of it, fuck, I don’t know how nobody else has seen through your domestic bullshit. Stop trying to fucking convert DR and DC, and-”

“So,” you interrupt, and lean back on one elbow, “I take it you don’t like the cookin’.”

Your kismesis is fucked in the pan. You know, because you’re responsible, and you’re counting on it. Instead of lashing out with his psi, he tries to slap you instead. Powerful, he might be, but he’s a sad twig of a thing and telegraphs his blows because he never had to rely on fighting dirty.

You catch his wrist and bend it away from your face. “I got enough scars.”

He barely hears you. Normally, he’s an onslaught, and the first blow means he’s not going to stop until he wins or dies trying - but here you are, his wrist in your grasp, not firm enough that he couldn’t break it if he tried, and he’s breathing hard. Experimentally, you twist his arm back a little, and he turns bright mustard.

He doesn’t do anything else.

You stand there in that tableau, let it spin out, then drop his wrist right before he says anything. “I ain’t the only one puttin’ on an act.” Your knife has spun off into a corner, so you collect it and begin paring the skin off another potato, projecting nothing but calm and mild-mannered. He hates it when you do that, like you’re the reasonable one. “Lemme know if you get yours to stick, Helmsman.”

It’s a shot in the dark, but you spent some very intense seasons holding him down by the arms, and you’ve noticed his tendency to drift off. His responses get more factual and single-minded if you interrupt him, then. Helming isn’t exactly the most pleasant of his life experiences, but you imagine that being able to detach and drown yourself in subroutines is a hard addiction to escape.

“Fuck you,” he says, finally, and walks away. You let him go and start dicing the potatoes, sinking every piece of brainpower you have into the task, and ignore the way your own hands are shaking.

—

You’re good at fucking things up. Exhibit A: Your Entire Life. Now that you’re rebuilding that from the ground up, though, you get to stop and question what you want in it. Right now, you have a hazy notion that your relationships are supposed to make you better, somehow. To kick your failings out of you, and to encourage your best. Choosing Suf and Psi has to mean something, then, about what you think better means - but that just puts you back on the mental treadmill of whether you want that, and how hard you’re going to smash things to pieces when it turns out you’re the same bag of bulges you’ve always been.

Being with Suf is so easy, is the thing. He’s stubborn and fierce and somehow patient, and the bits of him you’re starting to see now - hopes and worry, nerves, all the things that aren’t the best-foot-forward of early relationships - just make your heart ache a little. Would you have valued this, before you went mad from isolation? Are you just valuing it now because it’s better than being at the bottom of the ocean?

Dol watching you, assessing you every time you cross paths, helps. She knows you, and she cares about her - her son. Her sons, plural. If you were being yourself - your old self? - you think she’d probably kill you, never mind your current state of already having died. You’re going to have to decide if you like their standards of decency or not, so you can figure out whether to be glad or insulted there’s someone keeping you in line.

Psi is more complicated. You should be sick of all this mental looping, but it suits your mood, at least.

He needles you, is the thing. And you can take needling - you tune it out, because for the most part it’s just a rerun of what’s in your head anyway, except this time you get snapped out of it by him peeling himself away from you and putting his shirt back on. “-might as well go fuck my hand,” is the first you hear and process of his sniping.

You reach out and grab his sleeve. “Hey, don’t fuckin’-”

“Yeah,” he says, tightly controlled. “Not fucking was what was happening here, apparently.”

You roll your eyes and twist your hand in his sleeve harder. “I got fuckin’ distracted, you over-dramatic shit. Don’t even pretend that you aren’t usean’ this to ignore the world.” He hesitates, because that would be hypocrisy that could break the bubble universe you’re all stuck in. You take the time to pick yourself up to your knees and hook a finger between the buttons of his shirt, letting go of his sleeve and leaving that finger the one connection between you. He looks down at it and bristles, so you take a chance and shove him backwards before he can puff himself up into a self-righteous rant and sneak out in the middle.

He falls, awkwardly. He doesn’t scramble away as you follow him, leaning over him on your elbows. “I ain’t distracted now,” you say, keeping the scant inch between the two of you as an invitation and an escape route. “An’ if you manage to make it through the rest without driftin’ off, I’ll even apologise.”

His eyes narrow. Before he can attempt to wrest control of the situation - and his dignity - back, you skim down him, taking his pants with you, and sink your teeth into his hip.

He comes with his shirt tangling his arms behind his back and you weighing down his legs with your arms, and you wonder if you’re just a means to an end.

—

“We goin’ to keep fuckin’ around this, or?” you ask him, several sessions of strangely-charged hatefucking later.

“In is better,” he says in typical snide fashion, and demonstrates with a lewd gesture that you file away for later reference. It’s edifying, for how simple it is. “Really, DS-”

“Helmsman,” you interrupt. Wonder of wonders, he goes silent. “Becod I don’t fin you’re Psi, when we’re fucking.”

His shoulders slump. “Like you even care,” he says, weary. “Just - drop it, it doesn’t matter. We’re just-”

You lean forward and kiss him. When he tries to set his hands to your grubleg scars, you smack them away without pinning them down and kiss him again. You’re not sure what you’re doing, but he’s not sure what he’s doing either, and you’re sick of this - this unspoken thing where you’re in some kind of gentletroll’s agreement to use each other to cut out parts of yourselves. All it does is make you hate yourself more than him and that - you fucked up romance enough with Spin, you don’t need to go for the gold trophy here too.

Hesitantly, he raises his hands to your shoulders, then scrapes his claws along your gills. You shudder, and he presses the tips of his nails against your opercula harder, and laughs against your mouth at the sounds you make. You have to pull away for air and he lets you, smirking as he toys keens out of you with the barest touches. “This is what you want?” he asks, and traces the middle tine of one of your fins. “Orphaner Dualscar, undone by someone showing a little interest.”

“I hate you,” you tell him, because it’s important he knows. “I fuckin’ hate you and how you can turn on an’ off.”

His mouth goes into a flat line, an expression you’ve seen on Dol’s face enough to know it’s not good, and he sends sparks through you. It counts for more than any thousand bruises or scratches. “I hate you for always coming back.”

You collide somewhere in the middle, and it doesn’t matter that you just fucked. It doesn’t matter that you’re depleted - of food and water, rest, the sheer ability to care. You want him like you’ve never wanted someone in your life. He lays into you ferociously, finally bringing his psi to use. Normally, he’s targeted with it, using it for difficult tasks like ‘crossing the room’ or ‘getting the remote’, but now he emanatesit. It prickles against your skin, not quite painful, and when you reach up to tug at one of his horns it stings you from the inside out.

You’ve been feeling like that a lot, lately.

He doesn’t do anything showy with his powers. He’s bounced you off ceilings, before, and fucked you with nothing more than a mildly interested look from across the room, but now all he does is keep the pressure on - or maybe he’s taking it off himself. He’s - he’d impressed the scienterrorists pretty soundly when he wasn’t quite the Helmsman yet, already maxing out their charts. From bits and pieces Dol and Suf have said, offhand, he only got more powerful in the interim between you knowing him and his death. Maybe the keeping-himself-to-himself is the act of control, and the prickling means you just broke it.

You drink it down, pressing every inch of skin to him that you can. He burns near as much as Suf does and you relish in it, dragging your hands along his back and kissing him between gasping breaths, never desensitising to the feel that you’re always going to associate with him, even if it never happens again. When you drag him closer, into your lap, he sets his hands to your gills and pushes, the sting making you cut away with jerk even as you nearly make a mess of the both of you.

“What, you done?” he taunts. “CN liked to push feedback through me whenever I managed to break programming. Did it for an entire sweep, once, guess you’re just not cut out-”

You don’t want to listen to it. You don’t want to hear about all the indignities you enabled, you don’t want to deal with it, not now, you don’t want to stop hating him and start hating yourself and whittle away another part of you. There’s nothing left of you but raw nerves, and you don’t need to fuck him to hurt yourself. You’re doing a good enough job of that on your own time.

You want him as fucked-up and flayed-open as you are, because then at least you won’t be alone in it. So you set your fingers against his top pair of spinal jacks, which you’ve been avoiding in order to give this relationship the faintest veneer of normalcy, and pull down. You bump your way from pair to pair, your nails catching on the lip of each narrow tube, and with each tug, Psi goes a little slacker, a little looser.

You’re halfway down when he loses any expression at all. You stop, and when that doesn’t work, grab his chin and make him look at you directly. “I ain’t fuckin’ a machine,” you tell him.

“You sure?” he says, a little distant. He’s insulting you without even being here to deliver it himself, and it hurts that he can’t even be bothered to stick around for that, if you’re not letting him taunt you with failures you’re sick of chewing on. “You like it. You like having me on your strings.”

You suck in a breath, like he just punched you in the gut. Maybe he did. “I ain’t that person anymore,” you say, and you can hear the lack of conviction in your voice more plainly than he can.

He focuses on you a little more, and the slight smirk on his face is more painful than any number of words you’ve exchanged, in the course of this mess. “And I’m not a machine.”

In the silence that follows, he reaches around and presses your hand back to his jacks. He keeps his hand on top of yours, his long fingers a stinging, comforting thing. Slowly, you trace a circle around one of his jacks, and watch his face go slack again.

You lean in, press your forehead to his chest so you don’t have to watch (so you don’t have to admit that you want to watch), and resign yourself to being a terrible person as you play him like a fiddle.

—

You shouldn’t like pressing his buttons. That’s pretty high up on the list of How to be a Good Person, you’re pretty sure. But you, sick fuck that you are, like tearing him to shreds to figure out how he works nonetheless. And he likes tearing down the walls of Good Person that you’re trying to build, delights in pushing you until you push back.

He knows you. He knows you better than anyone else seems to, at this point. And he won’t let you stop.

He finds you at the lake. Not swimming, because you just got back from cooking and stripping off your clothes seems like too much effort. So you’re just sitting with your feet on the edge, one boot off and one boot on, staring across the black surface of the water and trying not to think about anything at all.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” Psi says, and sits next to you. You don’t even jump as he takes off his own boots and sticks his feet in the water. “SF too. And DR, and DC. Mostly me, I’m guessing.”

“You want somethin’?” you ask, and your voice comes out flatter than you mean it to.

“You could just tell me I fucked up.” Psi’s shoulders hunch up, defensive, and he doesn’t look at you as he swings his foot in the water. “Or that I’m fucked up.” When you don’t say anything, he continues, resolutely not looking at you. “You tried to tell me to back off, and I didn’t listen. So. I get it if you keep avoiding me, but at least quit making SF worry.”

You rub a hand over your face. It’s too late or too early for this. “I what?”

He shrugs a shoulder. “You don’t fuck machines.”

“Fuckin’ shell,” you say, more to your hand than to him. Dropping your hand into your lap, you say, “You were fuckin’ right, all right? You win. I’m a piece a’ shit that gets off on undoin’ you. Puttin’ on an act. Sorry I ain’t a better person.” Laboriously, you drag your still-booted foot closer and start working your foot free. It seems like a good time to go hide at the bottom of the lake for a while.

Psionics wrap around your hand, locking it in place.

“You control yourself,” Psi says, speaking fast, the words falling out of him. “It - it isn’t an act, but it feels like it. And sometimes it feels good, to just let go and take the easy path.” The power locking you in place dissipates, and you’re left staring at him, your hands frozen on your bootlaces even without him keeping them there. “To piss you off into controlling me, instead. So I don’t have to think.”

You close your eyes. It’s not like this sort of arrangement is exactly a new thing, but you’re the worst person he could have picked. “Psi. Leave you to me, an’ Isle-”

“You’ll what?” he snaps, vicious. “Helm me?” You flinch, and he presses the point. “You can’t fuck me up any worse than I’ve already fucked myself up. You don’t even want to.” While you try to come up with a rebuttal, he yanks off your boot, then goes for your shirt. Button by button, he spits out, “Who knows? Maybe you perfected the act. Maybe there’s nothing left of what I hate in you, and I’m the only one who can’t fucking move on.”

You grab his hands, because you know that monologue more intimately than you care to admit and it hurts more than you thought it ever would, to have it pouring from someone else’s lips. “Stop.”

He looks up at you, searching. You stay like that, then finally he licks his lips and says, “Make me.” It comes out more forlorn than you think he intended it to.

You let go of his hands, trace a finger along his jawbone. He swallows, then grits his teeth, ashamed of letting you see.

You have to get this right. More than anything else, you have to get this right.

“Arms behind your back,” you tell him, your mouth dry. Your hands are shaking again, so you put them on his hips and smooth your thumbs idly along the knives he calls hipbones until they stop. He looks at you, uncertain, but then pulls his shirt over his head and links his hands behind his back.

You slide out from under him and get up, head to the pile of clothes you’ve accumulated down here. A wardrobifier would be a good idea to have here, but you aren’t exactly renown for being a font of good ideas; case in point. Slowly, methodically, you unbutton the rest of your shirt, toss it in the pile of dirty clothes. Your pants will do, and you’re not entirely sure how you feel about taking them off at the moment, in any case. You can feel him staring at you as you shrug into one of your more formal shirts, purple stripes around the sleeves and your sign on your collar. You put your boots back on, one at a time, taking more care with the laces than you really need to. The bite of them against your hands as you pull them tight keeps you grounded. Your rings get put back on, and you even manage to dig up a couple of the fin rings you’ve been ignoring - you don’t think he’s likely to yank them out, at this point.

The pressure in the room feels strange. At first, you think it’s just you, then you realise how fixated on you Psi is, his power flaring when you tap the toe of your boot against the rock to settle it.

After considering a moment, you leave off the armour. What you’ve got is near enough the outfits you used to wear when you needed to remind people of your rank and still put in a solid night’s work. That done, you take a moment to close your eyes and breathe while your back is turned to him, then shove your hands in your back pockets and saunter over to where he’s still kneeling, arms still behind his back.

“Helmsman,” you say, flat military greeting. He comes up to your waist like this, and he stares flatly at your shirt, not responding. The air near him near crackles as soon as the word leaves your lips, though. You let the moment play out, then slide two fingers under his chin and crane his head back, make him look at you. You can’t make the air crackle, but you’ve had more than enough experience dealing with insubordination. “Helmsman. You wouldn’t be refusin’ to acknowledge a direct superior, would you?”

He sweeps his eyes up you, and if you didn’t know better you’d think he was bored. “Acknowledged.” You wait, and reluctantly, he adds, “Sir.”

It’ll do for now.

You drop his chin and pace behind him. He tenses, and part of you has a savage smile at the ready, pleased beyond all measure that he’s - that he’s scared, you are fucked up. But he doesn’t move otherwise, just breathes out his nose, doesn’t raise a single word of protest. “I’ve been told that you’re the best of what you are,” you say, because you were told that, once, and you doubt anything has changed. He near preens at the flattery, even with everything, and you can’t resist settling a proprietary hand in his hair. “I don’t care. You’ll perfoam for me, or you’ll naut.” At that, you let your fingers brush down his spine, barely missing his top set of jacks. He swallows then, and does nothing to hide it. “I fin you’ll find I can be pleasant to work under, so long as you work.”

“Go fuck yourself,” he says, flat, and at first you think you’ve done wrong, somehow, gone too far, misunderstood entirely, but then he adds with a tinge of triumph, “Sir.”

“Hn,” you say. “We’ll sea.”

He’s waiting for you to slap him, to scratch stinging lines across his back, to hurt him, to give him input he so desperately craves. Instead, you walk back to your small personal area, walled with all the crap you’ve accumulated, and pull Ahab’s out of your captcha deck. Psi watching in confusion, you sit down, grab a rag and the toolbox you keep nearby, and start disassembling your rifle to clean it.

You can tell when Psi’s back starts aching. He slumps a little, then tries to stretch out his shoulders without moving his arms. You hold the energy generator up to the light, then scrub off a bit of oil that got out of hand. You unlaced your boots and toed out of them fifteen minutes ago, made yourself comfortable for the long haul. Nobody ever said that having a kismesis was easy.

“DS!” Psi calls to you, five minutes later. You ignore him, re-cross your legs into a more comfortable position, and begin the fiddly task of getting Ahab’s barrel reattached. It’s a bitch of a thing, and if you don’t get it right, your aim will be off until you can be bothered to do it properly. Two minutes after that, Psi says, “Captain,” barely loud enough to carry to you and stained with loathing.

“A moment,” you say, at the same volume, and finish your task. When you get up, you don’t bother putting your boots back on, or rolling down your sleeves. Your fingers are stained black with oil, and you think you probably raked some through your hair a few times. Still, your point was made, and you’re hardly going to put your life on hold for him.

That isn’t how this works, after all.

“Helmsman,” you say. “Is there a problem?”

He squirms. Carefully, he says, “The physical component is in some discomfort.” Still with a pause, but not as much of one, he adds, “Sir.”

“I fail to sea how this is my problem,” you say, and wait. You can see the possible responses ticking through his head - no, it isn’t bargaining you want, no I’ll-pilot-if-you-fix-it, no I-won’t-be-insubordinate. You don’t care, and he knows that. There are means and ways, and he knows you know that. He tries to figure out what you want, and you know that if you asked for the moon he’d try to pull it out of the sky. You could have anything you want.

He settles on making it your problem. “It is adversely affecting operations.”

You could make him beg for just this. When you graze your fingers over the top of his shoulders, he nearly sobs with relief, and actually gasps when you dig your thumbs in. You knead his shoulders, losing yourself in the repetitive motions. At some point you kneel to get a better angle on his upper back, although you wish you had a stool so that you didn’t have to. Kneeling is a bit charged, the way things are. Still, it’s what you have at your disposal. When you reach his grubleg scars, he shudders.

It’s nothing compared to the way he keens when you tongue his spinal jacks. He does his best to keep still, even as you take your time, going from port to port. His efforts are mostly useless, of course, and you wrap your arms around him in the guise of idly stroking his chest to steady him. This isn’t something you’re doing for him, even though it’s something he asked for. You’re doing this because you want to, because taking him to pieces like this is - is satisfying.

You know him as much as he knows you, you realise, as he melts against your arms, still keeping his own behind his back, his fingers digging pale-yellow divots in his wrists. When your hand skims across his waistband, he actually gasps out a please, or at least half of one, so you take that as invitation and slip your hands inside his pants, ignoring his bulge to go for the quick release of his nook. He comes all over your lap, staining your pants, and you make him drowsily lick his genetic material off your hand as you steady him against your chest.

“Good job,” you tell him, and nip a kiss behind his ear before coaxing him back to his own support and standing up.

To your surprise, he yanks at you with psionics when you take a step, making you nearly stumble into him. Then again, he is an asshole, so you probably shouldn’t have been surprised. Before you can reprimand him, he mumbles - lethargic, he always gets sleepy after pailing, “Forgot something, Captain,” and undoes your zip with psionics, leaning forward to coax your bulge into his mouth. At first, you stand there stiffly - he’s never done this before, you figured his teeth made it tricky and never asked - but then you unwind and comb your hand through his hair, and it’s hardly like it feels bad - and the part of you that you’ve let out likes how he looks, your genetic material dripping down his chin. When you come, he licks his lips and looks up at you, smug like he’s gotten his own back.

“That’s enough, Helmsman,” you say.

He hears it for what it is and groans in relief as he slumps forward, letting his arms hang loose by his side. “My fucking knees, DS,” he complains.

“You poor, decrepit thing,” you say, but you manage to crouch down and pick up the bag of bones he calls a body.

—

You help him clean up, given that he got more messy than you did, through it all. He puts on his own shirt and one of your pairs of pants, loose around the waist to the point he can tie the excess fabric in a knot, and you put on the most neutral shirt and pants you can find. It’s still too early to sleep, which is a shame, because you’re suddenly so tired you could just about fold over and go to sleep standing up.

“So,” Psi says, and shifts his weight from foot to foot. “Gonna go murder all the lowbloods?”

“Goin’ to go hop back in your helmscolumn?” you ask, and are rewarded with a slice of a grin that isn’t mocking, or holding you in contempt. It’s just a grin, and you can’t help grinning back. “Look,” you say, edging out on thin ice. “I’m about ready to fuckin’ keel over an’ it might be the best sleep I’ve had since dyin’. I know you ain’t been much for sleepin’ either. Stay?”

Psi bites his lip, then shakes his head in disbelief, either at you or the situation, but the sweet smile you’ve never seen before and are unaccountably fascinated by stays. “Yeah, I’ll stay.”

—