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

[Mamorien]

In Headless Over Heels, Seth and Annalise unwind after the dance.

Seth belted the taupe terrycloth robe at his waist and stepped from the bathroom in a cloud of steam. His water-spiked hair pattered errant droplets against the hardwood floor on the way to his bed, which was narrow and creaky in an expensive and antique way, but cozy regardless. The autumn bedspread had been rolled neatly by the baseboard, and he unfurled its fur-trimmed comforter. He was a bundler when he got the opportunity. And this was the nicest bed he’d ever been in for longer than a tipsy tryst and an awkward goodnight.

He’d asked Lisa the difference between a roadhouse and a hotel. She’d laughed and said a few dozen braces a night and some fantastic plumbing.

Across a pair of flickering bedside corpselamps, a darkened ornamental fireplace, and an expanse of plush platinum carpet, the Verdugo sat in her own bed, in the his robe of the his & hers set they’d been provided, trimming her toenails. Her sorcerously suntanned skin had faded back to its unlit pallor, bringing with it her lethal menagerie of tattoos. Long-haired Lisa was gone, reduced to bleached bone and packed away.

“How about that shower, eh?” Annalise asked, back in her melodic Orwinese lilt. “Betcha haven’t had one of those in a while.”

“Sure haven’t,” Seth said, because he wasn’t sure about admitting that had been his first shower ever, in fact. Not a bad gimmick, but certainly not something a place like Prossimo would splurge on when a dip in the river or a warmed-up basin did the job just as well. The doughty men and women of the Low Plainland saved their money for taps that dispensed lager, not water.

“Sorry for switching out on ya. But I don’t, uh… I figured it’d be a bit awkward if it was Lisa.” She shook her hair out and grinned—Annalise’s gappy, crooked grin, not Lisa’s dazzling smile. “Plus the bob is a devil’s shade easier to dry off.”

It hadn’t been awkwardness, with Lisa. Not entirely, at least. “No problem,” he said, and as far as he knew it was true.

“Thanks for bearing with me while I was her,” she said. “That’s the second head who’s been a real dose with you.”

“Dose?”

“Orwinese slang. Means feckin’ annoying.”

It hadn’t been annoyance, either. Now he knew how Annalise intended to address the Lisa situation: she didn’t. He wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or upset.

Knuckle Nine

“We go to work tomorrow,” Annalise said, “so I don’t mean to mess with your sleep schedule too much. But it so happens I have a deck of cards and a couple of coins. You play much Knuckle Nine down there in Prossimo?

“Not well,” Seth said. “But I’d do a round or two.”

“Brill.” Annalise dropped to the carpet and sat cross-legged, propped on her bedframe, and Seth glanced at where her robe rode up the tattooed softness of her inner thigh, and told himself that this was not the woman who wanted him.

She rummaged in her saddlebag and produced a beaten-up deck of cards and a sable change purse, both of which she opened and dispersed across the floor. Seth took his deck of nine cards and they fell into the rhythm of the game.

It was easy enough, he supposed. With the different head and the different skin. If he just looked at her like a different person, it was easy enough.

But she isn’t. She’s the same. She told you that. The same thoughts in her head even if the head is different. If you’re going to stay sore about what Anna did, you can’t be choosy.

Fine, then. He wouldn’t stay sore.

“I wanted to say that I forgive you,” he said, as Annalise reshuffled the deck. “For the seraph incident. As long as you don’t plan on doing it again.”

“Can’t forgive me yet,” she said. “I need to make it up to you still, don’t I? Told you that.”

“I thought that was just Lisa being Lisa.”

She shook her head. “Sure look, Seth. I do still owe you one. And I would still be happy to hear what you want, if you’ve an inkling. Just wanted to repeat that in a, uh—less drooly way.”

“If you say so.” Seth pointed to a card in his hand. “Got a four of wings right here.”

Annalise hummed in thought. “If you say so. No challenge.”

Seth placed the card face-up. “That was a seven.”

“You little blighter.”

Seth drew a replacement. “When I said stop trying to be my mother, I was angry. But I don’t… it was shitty of me to say. You’ve been very kind to me. Probably…” He paused and rifled through his mind, trying to find something that would speak against what he was thinking. He came up short. “I have to admit, you’ve probably been kinder to me than anyone else has. Saints, isn’t that sad. The renowned kindness of the Verdugo.”

“Can I admit something back?”

“You gonna tell me you’ve got a jack in there?”

She grinned. “Not that, but now that you mention it, I do indeed.”

“Bullshit.” Seth passed her a coin. “Flip.”

“Heads or tails?”

“Heads.”

She flipped her brace. The stern, thin face of Charles il Nekropoli stared upward from the bedspread. “Bugger.” She put a card face down in front of her from the top of the deck. “Not well, he said. You wee liar.”

“I’m lucky tonight.” He drew a pair of cards into his knuckle-hand. “What’re you admitting?”

“Sometimes, Seth, I do wish I’d been your mother. That I’d been there for you earlier. That I could have kept some of the big nasty world from tossing you about. Or that someone had, anyway. Can’t pretend like I managed it with Tiago and Ofelia.”

“As far as I can tell so far, they’re good kids,” he said. “Not that I’m the expert.”

“Good kids.” She chuckled. “You’re not far from their age, you know. That’s what Tiago would say if he was here. A very defensive young man.”

“You’d have been better than what I got, I’m sure,” Seth said. “Mother-wise.”

“You never knew her, did you? Or not for long.” Annalise rolled a coin between her fingers. “What happened to her?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “My oldest memory is getting kicked under a table by some guy who said I was his nephew, but he had a dozen nephews and two of us were murani.” He laid a face-down card. “That’s nine. Knuckles up.”

Annalise grimaced at the pile in front of her. Six facedown, three up. “I bet this is terrible.” She flipped her cards. “Ah, fuck off.”

Seth scooted a coin from her pile to his. “How’d you know?”

“That my hand was banjaxed?”

“That I didn’t have a mother.”

She shrugged. “You’re searching.”

“Searching for what? A mother?”

“Dunno,” she said. “Just searching.”

They held each other’s gaze for five silent seconds. Her Annalise eyes were wider than Lisa’s, rounder and more expressive. He could see the tenuous sprouting something, growing thin and green from her to him, and the exact moment she slammed the shutter down to conceal it.

“And speaking of searching, we have a head to find tomorrow,” she said. “So I’ll go on and shuffle these back, and then we ought to hit the pit.”

He shook the moment off. “That mean you forfeit?”

“Ah, sure. Smug little so-and-so.” She began to strip off her robe, to the flimsy nightgown beneath, and paused. “Mind if we go lights out?”

He reached to the corpselight by his bed and clicked its bronze-fitted chain. Annalise followed suit with hers, and the woman across from Seth was reduced to a pale, indistinct phantom.

“Thanks, kiddo.” She kicked her legs onto the bed. Her skin was so bright in the dim that he could tell she had tattoos there, too. A dragon on her thigh, its tail curling up past the hem of her nightgown, slid beneath the surface of the linen bedsheets. “Saints gild your dreams.”

“You too.”

He sat in the dark, and wondered why he wasn’t tired, in this plush bed, after a day and night full of travel and motion and drink. He couldn’t just leave it like that with her, he realized. She could pretend, but he couldn’t.

He inhaled courage from the chilly night. The muffled sounds and dim lights of Fontana’s night shifts, reassuring him there was a whole world out there ticking along with amiable disregard for this high drama unfolding in his head, for the thief who was falling for the executioner, and after all, he was nothing but a man, and she a woman.

“Annalise,” he whispered. “Can I ask you something?”

No reply.

“Annalise?”

A snore sawed through the dark. He ought to have been irked, maybe, but he couldn’t help but smile to himself instead. She slept as big and unbothered as she did everything else.

It didn’t bother him, the snoring. He’d slept through far worse. It was the rhythm of Annalise’s breath, like the tide, that lulled Seth’s eyes shut.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...uckle-nine

And Scribble Hub is playing catchup:
Afraid of Being Afraid
Hounds, Foxes, and Hens
Auntie Lisa
The Dam
Sektorbrav Red
Slim and Sad
UPDATE: Fond Old Fool

Also, on a very special, mostly Sykora-less Princess of the Void:

WHOA, A BONUS CHAPTER.

That's right, gang. I said that if Headless Over Heels got into the top 5 of RS, I'd post a bonus on Monday and Wednesday. And hark! It has. Enjoy this bonus, then, and see you on Wed for the other.

Guppy

“Pause sim,” Hyax says. The distant explosions and gunfire, the roaring outback wind, it all stops.

Hyax paces through the building, past shrapnel frozen in mid-air from a secondary detonation in the ammo dump she was raiding. Past the crumpled, bloody corpses. Is Maekyonite blood really that bright red?

She climbs to the second floor. Bodies and pieces of bodies. Nobody moving—well, of course they wouldn’t be, she reminds herself. “Any surviving hostiles?” she asks.

“None in this scenario, Brigadier,” the calm computerized voice responds.

“Cease sim and give me an after-action.”

“Imperial forces: two major injuries, five minor. All Australian Defense Forces neutralized.”

Hyax looks into the frozen face of the dead Maekyonite. He’s simple and untextured. The simulator didn’t bother to animate his face or give him expressions—this isn’t the emotional endurance module. His impassive face stares at the range’s stony ceiling through the hole Hyax’s men blasted in the roof.

“End sim,” she says, and the tranquil corpse disappears.

She pulls her halfcape off and stows her rifle in its harness as she returns to the armory. She steps from her HAK and loads it back into the rack. Down the gleaming armory-level hall she goes, to her dark, cramped office. She sits on her uncomfortable metal stool and switches on her terminal. Her partway-done document stares back at her:

MAEKYON ANNEXATION COLLATERAL INFORTUNITY ADDENDUM: URBAN WARFARE SIMULATION REPORT

She scrolls past the butcher’s bill of obliterated Maekyonite armies. At the bottom of the list, she writes MELBOURNE ANALYSIS, and pauses.

Present this soberly and with no outward emotion. As you did with Eqtora. That is your task; your own emotions are not to be a factor. Grantyde will appreciate your passivity.

No, he won’t. These are his people. Gods of the Firmament. Can you look into his eyes and tell him the tale of how you will slaughter their warriors?

Hyax cups her hands into a visor atop her forehead, leaning down to hide the report’s stark digital characters. Why is she so terrible at this, at the emotional part? Again she feels the gap in her where a normal person could find these answers.

She stalks from her office and doesn’t realize where her feet are taking her until she’s aboard the lift to the hab level’s second ring.

She salutes a patrolling pair of marines as she makes her way to Hab Block Pekao-5. The Dignitary Suite on the third floor has been converted with a high doorway marked at its apex with a pair of crossed harpoons.

The door opens at Hyax’s hail. Ruaq-nai-Taqa, freshly bathed and smelling like tulaberry tart, smiles down at her. Her willowy slate legs are in a set of itty bitty shorts that terminate above her slouchy, chunky-knit sledger’s cardigan, its sleeves dwarfing her nimble little fingers.

“Hey, Guppy,” she says. “What’s up?”

Hyax belatedly remembers to act annoyed at her new nickname and stop wagging her tail. “I wondered if I might come by,” she says. “Finished up early for the day.”

Ruaq steps to one side and nudges her blubbery, finned tail out of the way. “Then you better get your little blue butt in here.”

Hyax strolls into the meq-Taqas’ cabin. “Is Ipqen home yet?”

“She’s on the way.” Ruaq shuts the door behind her and adjusts the prayer box on the other side. The little wooden family-god charms have been joined by a carved relief of the Black Pike. Ipqen and Ruaq insisted on adding it for Hyax, in place of whatever family god she might otherwise have worshipped. “Stayed over at work to help with the, uh—the engineering thing. The MZI. Did I remember that right?”

“You did indeed.”

“What’s that stand for, anyway?”

“Underdeveloped orbit adaptation.” Hyax takes her boots off and places them next to Ruaq’s agro-level mulch waders. “It’s a suite of modifications for operation in systems where there is no Imperial infrastructure. To ensure that there is no reason to depart the system. Failsafes and such.”

“So were we an underdeveloped orbit?”

“I am not going to answer that.”

Ruaq giggles. She giggles at a lot of what Hyax says, even when it isn’t a joke. Hyax told herself it was annoying when this relationship began and she thought she only wanted Ipqen. She considered it a problem to weather. But Ruaq’s affection is as sweet and bubbly as an effervescent ale and, to Hyax’s consternation, just as addictive. “I thought we were invincible and self-sufficient,” she says.

“Well, now we’re invincibler and self-sufficienter. Thanks to your fiancée and the protocol she’s instituting.”

Ruaq goes to the mek-Taqas’ music console and combs through a score of playlists on a minimalist digital display. They brought this from Harok—it’s big and bulky and primitive-looking, but Ruaq swears up and down there’s a warmth that its wooden cab speakers bring which the Pike can’t replicate. “They haven’t made any changes on the agro ring.”

“The agro ring needs none.” Hyax drags the Taiikari-sized adjustable seat over to the cabin’s dining table and winches it into position. “You botany gals are already operating at maximum optimization.”

Another airy giggle. “Flatterer.”

“It’s true,” Hyax protests, hackles raising. “I’m not—”

Ruaq’s thin arms wrap around Hyax’s shoulders from behind. “Hey.” The keeper’s snout brushes Hyax’s crown, sending a shiver through her. “You gonna sleep over tonight?”

Hyax’s belly gets that low-grav feeling in it. “If you would have me.”

“Of course.” Ruaq opens a cabinet and pulls a foil-covered tray from it. “Have some amma crumble. I made way too much for Specialist Mazek’s nameday thing.”

“Shouldn’t you ask Ipqen?”

“I already know what she’ll say.” Ruaq hands her a fork. “Try it and report back. I think I finally know how Taiikari like it.”

Hyax swallows her I shouldn’t and its attending I don’t mean to be a burden, and tucks into Ruaq’s cooking. It’s bold and sweet and decadently flaky, as usual, with an aggressive floral forwardness and a nutrient profile that Quartermaster Kymai would balk at. But Eqt help her, she’s stopped caring.

Ruaq balances on the balls of her feet. “Whatcha think?”

I think I am falling in love with you, Hyax thinks. “It’s good,” she says.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/120617...8/65-guppy
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/1419041...r/2407738/