The Dead Dove Locker -- "I don't know what I expected."

[Mamorien]

The Greenfield Family.

I expect many of you will have been waiting for this chapter. As of the last one, the Greenfields have gotten their secrets out and pretty much accepted what they've all become.

Now, it's time to make it official. To properly seal their new lifestyle, to set the course for what kind of family they're going to be from now on.

And you can probably imagine what that is going to involve.

https://storiesonline.net/n/52852/the-gr...-family/45

“Batty,” He leans into her. “What are you saying to me?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know how, I—I don’t know. But it can’t happen like this. I don’t want to be accountable. Not for this. If we are doomed, then let’s be doomed some other way. We have to find another way. We can’t let things turn like this for your people.” She’s on her feet now, silhouetted in front of the projector’s teal catastrophe. “We have to save them.”

Her tail lashes. He looks up into her fierce eyes. “Save them from what?”

“The Empire,” she says.

This time, her Impossible Hope of finding another way leads Sykora to dig deep.

”Save Earth from the Empire?” Grantyde wears a confused grin like it’s HAK plate. “We are the Empire. We’re saving Earth from itself. Aren’t we?”

“We’re dooming millions,” Sykora says. “You heard Hyax.”

“I did,” he says. “I was naive enough to imagine it’d be some other way, but the more I think about it, the more I understand how idiotic I was being. We were always going to break everything. All we can do is be there to clean it up afterwards. And I heard Vora, too. The number in the dark.”

He sighs. Sykora watches the lights turning off one by one behind her husband’s eyes, like a home being vacated.

“We can mitigate,” he says. “We can make it worth it. That’s what I’m holding onto.”

“No.” Sykora’s stomach is on the floor. “No, Grantyde, you—this isn’t what’s in your heart. I know it’s not.”

“What’s in my heart.” He laughs softly. “That’s so interesting, that Maekyonites and Taiikari both put stuff in there, when it’s just… stuff. Blood.” He crouches. “I’ll be okay, Batty. Not for a while, maybe. But we’ll—”

“We won’t,” Sykora insists. “Grantyde, I can’t do this. We can’t. Not without mangling ourselves beyond recognition.”

He chuckles ruefully. “So what, we cancel the invasion?” His eyes narrow at the defiant fold of Sykora’s arms, then widen. “We—Batty, are you serious?”

Sykora nods.

“We can’t,” he says.

“There’s precedent.”

“No, I mean—it—they’ll fucking kill us.” He seems to catch up with what she’s saying. “There’s precedent?”

“The Mandate,” Sykora says.

Her pause for effect is ineffectual...

Her pause for effect is ineffectual on her husband, who tilts his head in confusion. Of course he would—when would he have heard of the Mandate systems? This guilty chapter in the Taiikari history books is rarely flipped to.

“Before we’d developed the ZKZs, when Taiikari conquest wasn’t a simple game of waiting and warheads, the most dangerous annexations cost millions of warriors,” she explains. “There were territories we judged too dangerous to conquer. When the Empire concluded that a war for annexation would be unacceptably deadly for its citizens. These aliens were permitted stewardship over their own local systems, though any who meant to travel beyond their own star had to become Imperial citizens first.”

“So a truce, basically?”

“A treaty,” she says. “They remained sovereign over themselves and their system, and left the firmament to us, and joined when they were ready. But it was their call.”

“What happened to them when the ZKZs came along?”

“By then, the Mandate systems had been almost entirely absorbed,” Sykora says. “They’d been given a choice, and they ran the numbers and took it.”

“And now that’s all gone away.”

“Of course it has. Resistance to the Empire is no longer a question. There hasn’t been a single Mandate issued in kilos and kilos. How could there be, when no world can resist us? And even when it was an option, it was saved for planets which had a hope of damaging us. Doing it to Maekyon, to a world that’s barely discovered the sweep, would be far beyond any Mandate in Taiikari history.”

“So it’s unthinkable.”

“It is,” Sykora says. “But I’m thinking it.”

She hops onto the table and stands defiantly within the wireframe of Maekyon.

“If the Empress insists that the Maekyonites are already her subjects, then they are as under her protection as anyone,” she says. “We must judge their losses with the same scrutiny we’d use to judge the loss of Taiikari lives. And by this metric I judge the contest too destructive. And I must offer the Mandate to Maekyon.”

He gawks. He’s reacting to this heresy with such sense. Like a Taiikari would, she thinks, and tries to keep the despair from showing. “How?” he asks.

“I’m a Princess Margrave,” she insists. “We do it by me doing it, and damn the consequences.”

“We can’t just damn the consequences. They’ll—”

“They’ll circle me and snap at me,” she says. “They’ll rip me apart, if they can, I’m sure. The Mandates were the nearest the Empire ever came to surrender. Offering one to Maekyon? They’d think me mad. And God help me, I may be. I must be. But I don’t care. I survived for a decacycle of deprivation at the hands of your species and returned and claimed my throne again. I am the first Princess Margrave of the void sectors. The first wife to a free husband, the first mother to children of Maekyonite and Taiikari blood. I am Sykora of the Black Pike. I am not afraid of them.”

“The Peerage isn’t what scares me. The Empress.”

“The Empress?” She laughs, to hide the anxiety. “The Empress likes me.”

“She’s testing you. All the time, she’s testing. It’s the game, isn’t it? The one that determines the successor. If you don’t—if this doesn’t happen, if we do this, you’re out, surely. I think you’re out of the running.”

“So what?” she demands, and when he can furnish no response but an agog stare she presses on: “So what if I’m not Empress? So what if I lose this silly little competition?”

“Sykora.” Grantyde stands to get face-to-face with her. He’s wearing his anticomps, still. He hasn’t stopped wearing them, even after the reveal. She doesn’t understand why. She loves his eyes. “What happens once she dies? This Empire. It’s… if whoever is next isn’t like her, doesn’t think like she does, like you do, it’s a fucking nightmare. A nightmare within our lifetimes. That our children endure for centuries.”

“Grantyde, I haven’t told this to you because—” She steels herself to banish that juvenile teeter from her voice. She is a Princess Margrave. “Because I feared that when I did it would break your heart. You have such faith in me. Such ambition. But I am incapable of being Empress. I cannot do it.”

“You’re not incapable,” he says. “You’re the greatest Princess I know. You’d be incredible. There’s so many things we thought we couldn’t do, and we’ve done them.”

“We have. And it’s been so wonderful. I’ve had so many dreams for myself that I’ve put aside into this unlit place of the unthinkable, and you’ve found them and brought into the light. But this has never been one of them. Never ever.” Her compressing insides allow her a tight laugh. “My lovely man. Have you ever once heard me desire it? I don’t want to be the Empress. I’ve never wanted to be Empress.”

“If it’s a question of Taiikari loyalty—”

“It is,” she says. “But not in the way you mean, I don’t think. The Empress must be loyal to the Empire above all things. The Empress must place the Empire in front of everything. Everything. And I can’t do it.”

She extends her hand. Obediently he steps forward, and she nests her touch along his jaw.

“You or the Pike? If I had to choose. Do you remember?”

He nods.

“That was the hardest question of my life,” she says. “And I thank every God in the grand vault of the firmament that I didn’t have to answer it. But this? You or the Imperial seat? This isn’t hard at all, dove.”

She smiles, though her stomach is turning itself upside down over finally saying the words that she’s kept inside so long.

“I need my people. I need my Pike. I need to rule my sector and run my voidship and pop out a Staff Clash team’s worth of Maekyonite-blooded babies. That wasteland we saw in the Empress’s daemon, that misery, that lack of love. I can’t live that. Yours and Vora’s and Waian’s and Hyax’s and the children—my God, the children, I can feel it from them already. They can’t even say my name and there’s so much love. I wouldn’t trade it for a hundred Empires. I’ve become such a creature of love. I swim in it. If I’m taken out, I’ll die. I will never be Empress. If it was offered, I would turn it down, and if it was forced upon me I would seek escape with the same desperation I fled from my last prison.”

Her hand shivers. Her palm is damp with sweat.

“I will not allow you to change into whatever was required to conquer Maekyon,” she says. “I will not allow Grant Hyde to disappear in that way. I will not lose you. I will take the Mandate as my starting line, and I will find another path. I will burn all my capital with the Empress. I will convince her again, just as I have before, of the exceptionalism Maekyon presents. And if the Empress will not allow it—”

Then what, Sykora of the Black Pike? What will you do? What can you do? Can you even imagine?

Grantyde abrogates whatever dark conclusion she might have reached by sweeping her off her feet and into his arms.

“I’m sorry.” He lays kiss after scratchy kiss on her face. “I’m sorry, Batty. I never—I won’t disappear. I didn’t know. I’m so goddamn sorry.”

“Grant, no.” But her throat is leaping, giddy at the crumpling-up and throwing-away of the careful Taiikari norm. “Grant, you can’t say that—”

“Whatever,” he grunts, and boosts her higher, kissing her neck, her chest. “In English, then. I’m sorry. I love you.”

He takes hold of the sheer leggings she’s wearing under her uniform, nails digging into the thin fabric at the tail hole; she yelps with the crackling sound as he shreds them open. The chilly air stings the exposed skin of her rear momentarily before his giant, warm hands clamp tightly on her and squeeze. His palms were as covered in nervous sweat as hers; but the shaking’s stopped.

He slides her gasping onto the table and it’s all she can do to unclasp her uniform before her brute of a husband rips that from her, too. He kisses her exposed stomach, the tightening peaks of her breasts, her trembling lips. She fumbles with the catch of his belt. She tugs insistently on his anticomps and he gets the message, helps her tear them from his face. His big beautiful brown eyes shine with tears.

“Thank you,” he whispers into her ear, which quirks straight at the shivery sensation his dusty voice sends down her spine. “You pulled me back. I’m back. Thank you so fucking much.”

“Grant,” she pants. “Grant, wait—wait, we can’t do it here—”

His hands were journeying south from her ass, ready to flip her thighs up into their favorite place. They freeze.

“Oh, no,” she says. “Not really.”

He laughs and raises her hips until the small of her back is in the air and her tail is dangling.

From there, it goes the same sort of place as TGF, albeit behind spoiler tags in the RR edition.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/120617...sible-hope
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/1419041...r/2526304/

[Mamorien]

Headless Over Heels.

“Here’s what I don’t get about pirates.” Annalise prodded at her scar. “You’re a man of justice, Sunshine. No tears shed on the scaffold.”

“Sure.”

“But everyone goes away with the fairies when it’s pirates,” she said. “Even you.”

“To a point,” Tiago said. “I still would’ve killed him. Just let him do a monologue or two first.”

“We did,” Seth said.

“Piracy is a fanciful crime,” Ofelia mused. “Sky piracy doubly so. You say murder or assault, and your listener rightly frowns. But say piracy and you put stars in eyes. Who among us can’t relate to the urge to light out with a crew of vagabonds, quomodocunquizing across the United Territories in a baldrick and a ruffled shirt?”

“That’s not a word,” Tiago said.

“Shirt?”

“The quo- thing.”

“That’s absolutely a word,” Ofelia said. “When one hears of a pirate, one imagines living the life of the perpetrator, and not the victim. But the latter outnumber the former, always. And you die just the same at the hands of a rakish avatar of freedom as you do in the maw of a seraph. It’s the sense of belonging, I suppose. To an iconoclastic community.”

Belonging.

“Belonging.” Seth picked a blade of grass into pieces as he thought. “What if it’s belonging?”

Tiago lifted a brow. “What if what’s belonging?”

“When I used my Darkness up there,” Seth said. “One of them saw me and I… I told him he didn’t, I guess? Or that I was just minding my own business. And what you told me. About how a Darkness works. It’s what you long for. And I thought: what if my Darkness ends up being, I dunno. Summoning an image of Annalise’s butt.”

Tiago scoffed. Annalise tried to turn her laugh into some kind of irritated exhalation, but he’d gotten her with that one.

“And then after today, I thought, what if it’s tweaking the noses of the powerful? Or being a perfect liar? But that’s not what that was, I don’t think. It didn’t feel like I was lying, it felt like… like I was making it true.” He let the torn-up grass sprinkle to the ground. “I guess—if I really thought about it—I’ve always wanted to feel like I belong. To exist someplace, without being told to clear out or explain myself or whatever. To be accepted, I guess. Does that make any sense at all? Would it be ridiculous if my Darkness is belonging somewhere super-hard? Hard enough to fool people?”

Annalise stared at him in astonished silence.

Tiago cleared his throat. “Uh, yeah. That’d make some sense, I guess.”

“I hope you don’t take this as emasculating,” Ofelia said. “But that’s the most adorable thing I’ve ever heard.”

“We’ll need to verify that,” Tiago said. “We’ll work out some testing. And maybe build up your endurance. First time always knocks you on your ass, but you’ll get used to it.”

“Aye, well.” Annalise started as though shook awake, and clambered off the circle cloth. “That’s for later. Need you and your sister to head down the hill to ol’ Sheepfuck. Someone has to go tell the Corregidor—the Karla, whatever—we found our man and more besides.”

“What about the stormship?” Tiago asked, helping his mother to fold the magic circle lengthwise.

“Ship’ll keep.” Annalise ruffled her son’s hair. “Don’t you worry, Sunshine. I won’t sink it without ya.”

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...7-darkness
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/2385004...r/2531287/

[Mamorien]

More Headless Over Heels.

The scaffold creaked under the heavy stride of the Verdugo as her shadow fell across the kneeling woman. “Do you love your people, Jesska il Maksdotir?”

The waxen-faced sacrifice blinked away her sweat. “I do.”

“Do you repent your crimes against them?”

“I do.”

“Do you give praise to Hundred Saints, and to the Sorcerer General, and the deathspell beneath which he shelters us?”

“I do.”

Annalise whistled toward Jesska’s blind spot. “Ho, there, Tiago. Pass me the sword.”

Jesska turned her head in confusion to Tiago where he stood gauntly to one side—didn’t the woman behind her already have her black blade ready?—and Annalise struck.

The village of Tondarre reacted with a healthy ohh! Only a couple of screams, no whooping or clapping. Seth, observing from the carriage’s threshold at the rear of the crowd, was developing a theory that you could tell how the year had been in a village by the sound their assembly made when the head went flying.

“Why does she do that?” he asked the placid girl at his side as she flipped the hasped broach of her traveler’s cloak open and shut. “The fake-out?”

“It positions them right,” Ofelia said. “If they stay put, they hunch sometimes, or dart, or the muscle is tense with the anticipation of the blade. The al Ydrises don’t swing twice.”

“What does she whisper to them? The reluctant ones?”

“I’m not sure,” Ofelia said. “Mother’s actually never executed me, if you can believe it.”

“It does beggar belief.”

“Thank you, Jesska.” Annalise passed a palm over the corpse’s gray eyes and shut them forever. She pulled a rag from her belt pouch and wiped the wide span of her steel. “With that, folks, we’re done. On behalf of the Legion and the Sorcerer General, I thank you all for your loyalty, and wish you as warm and safe a winter as Ms. Maksdotir’s sacrifice has earned you. We’ll see you next year.”

Esteemed colleagues and also Ofelia, I decree the 841 quota season complete!

The sword hissed back into its scabbard. The prisoners who had earned a punishment gentler than its mercy were corralled from the scaffold. Annalise waved aside a hermandati gauntlet on offer to ease her passage to the ground, and hopped down instead, her boots splashing into the mud.

Corregidor Tannon valiantly attempted warmth from as far as one could reasonably excuse. “Madam Verdugo. It’s such a privilege to finally make your acquaintance.” The guy had a pair of long gloves on and a scarf cinched up past his chin, which he took every second breath from. The proper Corregidor maneuver was to invite the new Verdugo to stay in the manor. Tannon’s training did pitched battle with his terror of catching the soul-sickness from this huge unlit woman. “I would love to. Er. Well, that is to say, it would be such an honor to invite you and your retinue to stay, in, in whichever, uh—we, we understand Ms. il Maksdotir lived alone, and perhaps—”

“It’s been grand to meet you, Corregidor.” With a merciful smile and a wave, Annalise released Tannon from the metaphorical meathook he dangled from. “Truly it has. But if it’s all the same to you, we’ve got to be on the hoof again. It’s a chock-a-block schedule. So unless there’s any pressing business—”

“Of course, Madam Verdugo!” Tannon was so loud and abrupt it brought a startled flush to his own face. “Of course. Wouldn’t dream of keeping you. Yes. Uh, be well.”

Annalise mirrored his relief as she departed Tondarre’s emptying plaza, Tiago in tow. Seth moved aside; she caught his hand and tugged him with her into the carriage. “Come on, come on, come on,” she whispered urgently. Ofelia scurried in after them. The spring steel of the carriage’s black-lacquer driver box squeaked beneath Tiago’s hasty clamber to the reins.

Ofelia banged her palm on the front-facing window’s diamond lattice. “Go, go!”

Tiago cracked the reins; Draco and Draka huffed into motion. Demetrius, tethered into their train, knickered with annoyed confusion at the haste.

“Not yet. Not yet, dammit. They might hear us.” Annalise indicated a scaffwood tree split along its midpoint like a tuning fork. “Once we’re past that.”

The carriage trundled past the tree. Tiago stood on his seat and proclaimed it in his praise the Verdugo voice: “Esteemed colleagues and also Ofelia, I decree the 841 quota season complete!”

Annalise seized Seth and showered the side of his face with kisses; Tiago banged his fist on the roof; even Ofelia couldn’t help but bounce in her seat and punch the air.

“Thank you, Jesska, for number fifty,” Annalise cried, “Thank you, Plainlands, and smell you later! Thank you, Draco and Draka and Demetrius and whatever Seth is naming his! And thank you, Sunshine and Feeli and Seth il fucking Gutierre because we did it!”

They cheered, and broke out the red wine and the nice cups that were wrapped in newsprint and stuck inside a munition breastplate for safe-keeping, and Seth was exactly where he belonged.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...lers-haven
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/2385004...r/2532866/

[Mamorien]

And now on Headless Over Heels, a musical interlude.

Out in the brightly lit center of the taphouse they’d cleared the crockery from a banquet table, and a pair of musicians—a mitegrinder and a fiddler—were taking requests. “Don’t be shy, now!” The mitegrinder snapped shut the trap on his boxy instrument’s toggle and its low drone began. “For a solitar we’ll play what you please. For a brace we’ll play it sober.”

“Hey!” Seth whistled and waved a score coin. “Do The Verdugo and the Maiden!”

“Where’d you get that—” Annalise patted her pocket. “Oh, you blighter.”

“C’mon,” Seth said. “This is your profession’s anthem. Don’t tell me you don’t love it.”

Annalise snatched her purse back from him with a dry laugh. “I dunno if I’ve heard it, pet.”

The musicians were looking askance at the clutch of unlit. “Begging your pardon, master.” The fiddler’s swallow bobbed his instrument where it lay at his neck. “Perhaps it’s not a song for a mixed crowd.”

“She loves it. Don’t worry about it.” Seth added a second score to his palm. “C’mon now. You gonna catch these?”

Annalise scoffed. “How the feck d’you keep robbing me.”

“You need to pay me more regularly.”

“He’s got the Forked Tongue on his back,” Ofelia called to the dithering players. “He’ll join in.”

“C’mon then, goodman,” the fiddler cried. “And bring your braces.”

Seth balked. “Oh, hold on now. It’s, uh—it’s not active.”

“Yes it is.” Ofelia gave him a kick forward from their booth. “Get up on that table, Mr. il Gutierre. That’s an order.”

“You don’t give me orders.”

“I do,” Annalise said. “And I’m apparently paying good money for this. Get up there, Seth.”

Seth scrambled onto the table as the music rose, and with his new colleagues, he sang.

The Verdugo with his thirsty sword came riding on his bay...

The Verdugo with his thirsty sword came riding on his bay

Sing who’s the one whose pretty head I’ll have for me today

He startled himself with the sound of his own voice. The Forked Tongue hadn’t applied much to his conversation; maybe a bit more bass to his brogue, but nothing more. He’d been vaguely disappointed. Now, though, singing, he felt it. Felt all the imperfections stripped away as if by an acidic bright dip bath. Annalise beamed.

And up the scaffwood he did climb, and whistling all the way

The Legion calls and one must fall whose head I’ll take today

A head, a head, a pretty head! A head for me today!

Seth had never been particularly afraid to sing, especially once you got some corn whiskey in him. But he wasn’t a singer. Not a one you’d beg to hear, or toss braces at his feet. And yet here they were. Clattering by the toes of his boots. He laughed aloud at the joy of it. He was soaring like a songbird over the hairy-headed revelry. He was good.

Forward came a maiden fair with dainty doily dread

O Verdugo all in black, O mercy lord, she said

My father stole a stallion, yet I’d weep to see him dead

So spare the man your thirsty sword and take my maiden head

O take, and take, and take again! And take my maiden head!

There were four more verses, each more obvious than the last. By the finale Seth had been outfitted with not one but two straw hats.

And okay: when the reels and dances began, the first girl who offered her arm blanched with sudden remembrance and snatched it back before it could graze unlit skin. But Seth already knew who he wanted to dance with, and she never hesitated to touch him.

“Was it worth your scores, Madam Verdugo?” he asked, as she twirled him off the table.

“It was a bleeding slag,” she said. “But I love how you sang it.”

Her utter fearlessness of the world’s attention, when she kissed him, screamed in the face of his thief training. A life spent in the shadows, now dragged into the light and kissed by a gorgeous, indulgent giant. It would take practice to get used to this.

Wet, wonderful practice, he reflected, as Annalise led him back toward the table from whence they’d come.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...the-maiden
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/2385004...r/2536840/

[Mamorien]

The Greenfield Family.

With the Greenfields having officially accepted their new lifestyle, now we see them branching out to their nearest and dearest outside the immediate family. Over the course of a week, it's time to see how they incorporate everyone who's been a part of their transition become a part of what they have become.

It looks like all is working out for the best...

...or are there still some threats lurking in the corners?

https://storiesonline.net/n/52852/the-gr...-family/46

Princess of the Void.

Master Sergeant Ajax is in his cabin, sitting in front of his and Meena’s portable terminal. The flotilla drama they were watching last night is still on screen, paused where he fell asleep—Meena paused it on a frozen image of a weeping woman, her horns half-cocked, a pistol in her hand.

He blinks. He doesn’t remember how he got here.

His anticomps are raised to his forehead. In his lap is one of his wife’s stuffed animals, an adorably bug-eyed throok with orange felt skin, with a big patch that’s turned pale and threadbare on its middle left leg. Ronax really loves chewing that bit, and to Ajax’s pleased surprise, Meena just giggles when he does and doesn’t flash the boy to stop.

In his hand is a datawafer. WATCH ME is written on it in thick-lined memorandum ink.

All right, Meen.

Is this some kind of romantic gesture from his wife? “All right, Meen,” he murmurs, and slides the wafer into the terminal’s bank, anticipating something adorably pornographic.

The Prince of the Pike’s face fills the screen. Ajax nearly jumps out of his skin.

The screen tilts and the massive Maekyonite backs away, seemingly satisfied with the camera he’s just set up. Behind him is a view of his cabin. Her Majesty and their children are missing. There’s nobody inside but Grantyde.

And—as the cabin door slides open—Ajax. He watches himself on the recorded video step into the room and salute. “Majesty.”

He has no memory of this.

Grantyde indicates an ornate gulwood seat. “Have a seat, Master Sergeant.”

Video Ajax sits stiffly in the chair. It’s worth as much as the HAK armor he’s wearing.

Grantyde sits across from him and points at the camera. “I’d like your permission to record you, Ajax.”

“You’re always recording me,” Ajax says.

“Yeah, but this recording is special. This one, nobody but you will see. So if you’re watching this in the future I need to order you to do it alone. Just in case.” Grantyde waves at the camera. “Pardon the trouble, Meen, but please leave the room.”

Ajax looks over his shoulder. He’s alone in the cabin except for Karinax, who’s in his crib sleeping. He presumes Grantyde would make an exception. He turns back to the screen, where his digital doppelganger is sitting in attentive, impersonal silence, Grantyde’s reflection in his visor.

“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,” Grantyde says. “About a lot of things. Recently, I mean. I’ve been thinking about the ways I’ve changed, and how I’ll have to keep changing, and sometimes about the ways I don’t think I’d like to change at all, actually. I’ve been rushing. That’s understandable, you might say, in my position.”

Ajax doesn’t say that—he says nothing at all, in fact.

“But if I think about it,” Grantyde says. “If I look back at my first days on the Pike, more than any promise that was made to me or exception established in my name, it was you who changed me first. You made me realize I could live here, Ajax.”

He pauses, then, in invitation for Ajax to speak. Ajax doesn’t. Modern Ajax congratulates himself for how formally he’s following procedure on the recording.

“You’re my friend,” Grantyde says. “Maybe my best friend, if wives don’t count. And it took me decacycles to get there, to have someone I could count as much a friend as a subject in the way I counted you, and I need it back. Whenever I picture my kids’ childhood it’s them being best friends with yours. And I think at one point, you pictured the same.”

Another pause. This time, Recording-Ajax fills the silence with a brief “Majesty.”

“I thought I was being responsible trying to keep my distance.” Grantyde threads his fingers behind his head and sits back. “But, well—like I said. I’ve been thinking. And I think I’m done trying. So it’s either me order you to be my friend again—that’s a joke—or this.”

The watching Ajax feels his shoulders load with tension. The recording Ajax stiffens, too. “What is this, Majesty?”

“This is me explaining myself,” Grantyde says. “This is the truth you deserve about what happened the day I was compelled, even though it’s—”

The screen flickers. The timestamp in the corner jumps ahead by five minutes. Ajax watches the skip in time knock him into a forward lean, hands clasped tightly. His helmet is off, now, by his feet on the floor, a look of muted shock on his own face.

“—et it now?” Grantyde asks. “Why I had to do what I did, and play along with it and keep this from you?”

Video Ajax stares down at his hands. “Hellfire,” he mutters.

Grantyde laughs drily. “Imagine how I felt.”

Whatever this video skipped so thoroughly dumbfounded Ajax that all he can respond with is another “Hellfire. Fuckin’ hellfire.” He snaps partially out of it. “How long has—”

The video jumps.

“Now I’m giving you the choice,” Grantyde is sitting back down and handing Ajax a glass of water. “I will let you hold this thing, with the knowledge that it’s a monstrous breach of secrecy and—”

A digital click accompanies another jump.

“But I’m guessing that’s causing you some distress.”

“Yes. Yeah.” Onscreen Ajax takes a sip of water. His legs are hooked beneath his seat, tail wrapped round its base, like the grav’s been shut off and he’s holding himself to the floor. “I mean—I can handle it.”

“I know you can,” Grantyde says. “That’s why I’m telling you.”

“But wait.” Ajax looks up. “ If you—”

The tape skips forward again, another minute.

“—top talking about it in concrete terms at this point, please,” Grantyde says. “I’m gonna need to edit this myself, and I barely know how.”

“Couldn’t the Chief Engineer? Unless… nobody knows you’re doing this, do they?”

Grantyde shakes his big shaggy head. “Just you, Jax. Though I might tell Kora if you decide to keep this in your brain.”

“As opposed to…” The light goes on for video Ajax at the same time as it does for the guy watching it back. “You’re gonna compel me.”

“That’s your other option,” Grantyde says. “Meena’s waiting outside. I can get her in here right now and ask her to remove your memory of what we talked about here. Then I’ll give you this recording, with the sensitive shit cut out of it. And you can watch it, and know that I trusted you enough to tell you. That I trust you with my life, and the life of my family, and the Pike. And that I’m sorry for what happened and the cycles of distance it’s made, and I need my friend back. So if you can be satisfied by this shadow of the truth, we can flash the rest away. But if you need an explanation, you have it now. And I’ll let it stay in your head.”

Video Ajax is statue-still.

“Jax?” Grantyde prompts.

“I’m thinking.”

“Take your time. Do you have any more quest—”

Another jump. They’re both on their feet now, shaking hands.

“—ver again,” Grantyde says. That’s a promise.”

Ajax watches himself shift his grip on the handshake and pull the Prince of the Black Pike into a hug. What the fuck are you thinking, he wants to ask himself, but Grantyde smiles and thumps him on the back.

“Thank you, Majesty,” video Ajax says. “Thank you, I—it’s been such a fucking hole in my head. It shouldn’t have been. I’m not… I didn’t deserve—”

“Yes, you did,” Grant says. “I love you, man.”

“I love you too,” Ajax says—shouts? The audio just boomed so hard that it clipped at the edge. “Edit that shit out.”

Grantyde laughs. “No way. I’m turning it way up. And putting it two more ti—”

“I love you too. I love you too.”

“—mes right here.”

Ajax points toward himself in the future. “This is where you’re recording from?”

“Yep.”

The camera shifts as the Ajax of the past picks it up. “Master Sergeant,” he says, sternly. “I’m electing to remove the memory of the explanation His Majesty gave us. But I am stating directly to you, in the future, that it satisfied me. And if you’re watching this and you insist on maintaining your distance, stop being a dumb asshole.”

“And let me know when you’ve watched this,” Grantyde’s voice from over Ajax’s armored shoulder. “Please.”

“Sure.” The camera jolts around. “Catch.”

“Wait Jax wait that’s expens—”

The video feed ends.

Without meaning to, Ajax has been crushing the hell out of his wife’s stuffy. He tosses it back onto their comfy little nest with the rest as he stands.

He puts his anticomps back on and exits the cabin.

Where are you going? he inquires of his feet. They’re pointing him toward the sleek pillars of the lifts, where they rise like a needle from the center of the hab ring. Towards the command deck, and the Prince he thought he knew, and then thought he didn’t.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/120617...7-watch-me