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/