by Amy Lane
Dorjan allowed a dry laugh. “Practice,” he said, knowing he was falling asleep in spite of the pain. “Is he really here? Really all right?”
She reached out for his hand and rested it on Taern’s softly moving chest on top of the covers again. That gentle rhythm calmed his heart, calmed his pain, and he slept.
WHEN he woke up again, it was dark, Taern was gone, and he had to use the loo. He pulled back the covers and grimaced, because the sheets were sticking to his seeping wounds. Bimuit, he didn’t want to think yet about what a near thing it had been. Easy not to think of death now. Everything hurt, including his bladder. He groaned and pushed up on the end table and was disgusted when his arm buckled and he fell back down on the pillows. He kept the sound in and just lay there, seeing stars and feeling stupid tears starting. Hells, he’d left half his flesh on the bloody city street, and it was a child’s dilemma that almost broke him!
One more time. He braced his arm at his side and swung around, gasping as the stitches on the slice over his stomach pulled, as did almost every damned thing on his body, but he was sitting up, and that was good.
Now, standing.
It took three tries to stand, and he was tottering there, seeing through the darkness in his eyes and trying to calculate how many steps it would take to get to the wall, when his door opened and Taern started swearing at him.
“Karanos take it, you bloody fucking git! Sit the hell down! Where do you think you’re going now!” Taern was standing at the doorway with a tray, but he put it down and moved to Dorjan’s side.
Dorjan felt absurdly near tears again. “To piss,” he muttered. “I have to piss. Is that so bad? It’s five bloody paces, maybe ten!”
“Yes,” Taern snapped. “Yes. We have a mason jar for just that reason. But no. You and your dignity, you think you’re going to walk. Get the hell back in bed and be grateful that breathing is still an option.”
Dorjan took one stubborn step forward and, to his horror, felt his leg give way. Taern was pushing up under his shoulder, bearing his weight, before he could fall. One step back, then sitting down, then lying down, and he was back in bed, nauseous, dizzy, and in more pain than before. And….
“Mason jar?” he begged, feeling pitiful. The indignity was excruciating, but Taern didn’t seem to care. He watched as Dorjan relieved himself, then took the full jar and actually examined it, grunting when it was merely pinkish from some bruised kidneys before taking it to the privy to dump it and wash his hands. He came out dabbing at his eyes, and Dorjan grimaced.
“I’m fine,” he said kindly.
“You can’t even get out of bed to piss,” Taern snapped. “Not. Fine.”
“I could too get out of bed,” he snapped back and then deflated a little. “It was the walking that got in my way.”
Taern sat down next to him on the bed and sighed, then reached out and cupped Dorjan’s face, stroking his cheek with a bony thumb.
“Dorjan?”
“Yes?”
“Have you ever taken your pleasure with a man?”
Taern’s eyes were a lovely, mesmerizing midnight blue, and Dorjan found he was too weak to look away. “With you, more than once,” he said. He was trying to be light, but his voice came out husky and sincere.
“No. That’s not what I meant. Have you ever had a man in your bed, spent the night exploring and making love and laughing? Touched someone just to touch them? Kissed just to kiss, with no end in sight? Have you ever moved inside someone who craved your touch? Had them move inside of you? Ever?”
Dorjan’s jaw tightened and his eyes narrowed, and he jerked away from Taern’s hand. “You know the answer to that,” he snapped, and Taern grunted.
“I suspected. But see, last night, we were fighting back to back, and it kept flashing through my mind. He’s got to live through this night. He must, because he’s never done that. Look at me, Dorjan!” Taern commanded, and Dorjan was too weak to evade him. “I want you to do that. I thought fighting by your side, that would be enough, but it’s not. I want to be by your side. I want you to know what it’s like to be loved, Dorjan son of Kyon. I need you let me do that.”
Dorjan felt helpless, and he hated that. “You’ll leave me?” he asked, everything, everything hurting at once. He hadn’t acknowledged pain like this since he’d awakened in the hospital outside of Karanos.
“No,” Taern whispered, looking down. “Don’t you see? There’s no ‘or’ here. There’s no ultimatum. I will not blackmail you into loving me. But you’ve needed for so long, and you’ve never voiced it. And I need. I need you like breath. I may not get what I need, but I’m not strong like you. I need to give it voice when you’re too weak to tell me I’m mistaken.”
Dorjan tried hard to look past his own pain. “I’m sorry I scared you,” he said after a moment. “I’m sorry I’m… damaged—”
“Don’t apologize for that,” Taern said fiercely. He moved his hand to his lap, and Dorjan missed it. “I don’t want any apologies, Dorjan. I just… just needed you to know.”
Dorjan closed his eyes, because Taern’s face was so open, so naked with emotion, that for a moment Dorjan felt violated by Taern’s intimacy.
“I thought of you,” he said, surprised when he said it. “Your snotty little smirk, your eyes—they’re really extraordinary, you know that, right? How excited I was to think I’d actually wake up next to you, and how I trusted it would happen.” He opened his eyes. “It’s not such a bad thing, that you need me.” He was growing tired again. “Please. I don’t want it to be a bad thing that you need me.”
Taern smiled a little and dashed his hand under his eyes. “It’s actually really wonderful,” he confessed. “When I’m not afraid that you’re dead.” His voice cracked on the last word, and Dorjan lifted up his hand and pulled the boy gently onto his chest.
“I’m relieved,” he murmured. Taern had bathed, and he smelled clean and warm, with an animal male component that comforted Dorjan in a thousand ways. “I’ll try not to be dead that often.”
“Don’t be dead at all, you prat!”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
They were quite for a moment, and Dorjan found himself absently stroking Taern’s hair.
Taern moved gently and turned so he was looking up into Dorjan’s eyes again. “Dorjan, have you thought about when this thing—this Nyx thing—when is it going to end?”
Dorjan was almost asleep, and he spoke through a yawn. “In death,” he said.
He had a bigger plan than that, something that would change the political climate, pull them out of the war. He had a plan for altering the balance of power, for filling in the power vacuum so that no more lives were spent, no more unnecessary violence occurred when trying to heal the wounds of Biemansland.
Taern jerked upright and glared. “Take that back!”
“Not mine,” Dorjan murmured, too groggy to elaborate. “Not mine. Found something to live for.”
Taern put his head down then after that, and Dorjan fell asleep with his fingers stroking the boy’s hair.
There was a haze then—hot skin, sweat, body aches, wounds on fire, and bowels of ice. Taern was there a lot, and Krissa, as well as Mrs. Wrinkle and, surprisingly, Areau. Those moments with Taern felt real, felt sweet. Dorjan remembered trying to make him talk because the boy was always talking and it didn’t feel right when he wasn’t. He was embarrassed with Krissa and Mrs. Wrinkle, because sometime in there he lost his smallclothes, although neither of them seemed to care they were changing a naked man’s bandages. Areau was neither awkward nor necessary. He was happy to see his boyhood friend, and although Dorjan remembered he should shy away from Areau’s touch, in his delirium, he couldn’t remember why.
When he came to, he was naked, he seemed to have fewer bandages, and Taern was asleep on the coverlet next to him, this time nearly fully clothed. Dorjan thought about struggling upright but knew, objectively, he was too weak to do that.
“Awake?” Krissa said
by his side, and he blinked at her.
“How long?” he asked hoarsely, and she brought water up for him to drink. When he’d sipped that, she brought fruit juice, and he drank that gratefully.
“Well, you woke up the afternoon and evening after you arrived, and we thought everything was blue skies. And then that night, infection set in—that was three days ago, my friend, and I must tell you, you’ve had me, at least, wondering who was going to pay my milliner bills when you couldn’t anymore!”
Dorjan managed a tired smile at her, because his last actual conversation with Taern had been a little emotional, and he was too tired to do emotional right now. “Will Taern forgive me?” he asked, and his voice was gruff with disuse.
Krissa wrinkled her lovely nose and shrugged. “I don’t know what you said to him before your fever set in, but it made him absolutely adamant that you were going to live. The rest of us weren’t so confident, let me tell you!” Her asperity eased, and the lines in her face settled into something less young and animated, something much more exhausted. “I’ve grown rather fond of you and Areau in the past weeks, Dorjan. Could you not scare us all again?”
“Areau was worried?” That seemed a wonder. “Thank you,” he said, because he had no doubt it was all her doing.
“He’s not an evil man,” she said quietly. “I know… the relationship you two had, it must have felt that way. Evil. Corrupted. But I think you were right to keep him from self-destructing. There is something very”—Krissa blushed—“appealing about him, when he’s not being a right cunt.”
Dorjan choked on a laugh, and she brought up another sip of water. When he was done with that, he had to remember that he wasn’t allowed too many sweet, personal conversations, whether with Taern or about Areau. He was more than the sum of the people he loved or who loved him. “The Forum,” he said softly. “I know they didn’t ring bells for the three days of the riot, but after that?”
“Not the two days after that, either,” Krissa confirmed. “But they rang them this morning.”
Dorjan closed his eyes and tried to do the math. “Rest days?” he said, groggy. “Forgive me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t that make tomorrow—”
“Yes, it’s part of the two day. But Dorjan, you’ll barely be able to walk in two days!”
Dorjan tilted his head a little on the pillow and realized his neck was stiff. “Well, Krissa, I do have a personal conveyance,” he said, trying to be jaunty. “And that’s what those are for. But I need to be there. It’s not even necessary that I do anything—if I sleep through the meetings, people will assume I’m just that dim. It won’t be the first time.” The fact was, sleeping through pointless meetings where the conclusion had already been determined by graft and greed was one of the benefits of being considered an idiot by most of his peers. Go ahead and let the poor boy sleep—it’s not like he’d have anything to contribute to the conversation, right?
“Why?” Krissa asked, her voice thready with what must have been exhaustion. “Why does it matter if you’re not doing anything there?”
“Because I don’t want them to think I’m not capable, for one,” he said honestly. “Triari Septra is just waiting for me to die—hoping for it, actually. If I die or am found guilty of treason, he’ll find a way to get my family’s keep. I’m the only one stopping him now, and it’s a daily battle. Once that happens he can mine the asteroids until our planet shakes itself to dust. He’s shortsighted and egomaniacal and….” It was getting hard to breathe, just talking about it. He closed his eyes and calmed down. “I can’t appear weak,” he said finally. “Do you understand?”
He opened his eyes and saw that she was nodding. Her face looked pinched and sad, but she understood. “I’ll tell Taern,” she murmured. “It’s going to be hard to make him understand.”
Dorjan smiled tiredly. “I’ll have to make it up to him,” he said quietly, and although he’d stopped fantasizing about sex long, long since, when he closed his eyes, he held a single image in his mind: Taern, naked, straddling his body, head thrown back, eyes closed, with the sun coming through the shades and illuminating his face as he gave himself over to Dorjan with every quivering atom.
He wanted that, he realized as he fell asleep. All these years of thinking he had given the best of himself away, and that was the part of him that wanted that moment, needed that moment, in the same way Taern had said he needed Dorjan too.
HE WOULD have to wait far longer than either of them wanted for that moment to arrive.
The next morning, he was awakened by a terrible pounding at the door. He was struggling to sit up when Taern sprang out of bed—bare naked, which was nice because it meant he’d stopped worrying—and glared at him. “Sit down. I’ll go see who that is!”
“Dressing gown!” Dorjan snapped. “They’re trying to make it a death sentence to be sly in the Forum—are you looking forward to that?”
Taern stopped and gaped at him. “I hate your bloody province,” he muttered, stomping for the armoire. “There I was, trying to fly a bloody kite, mind you, and your entire fucking army comes along and destroys my home, and then tries to kill you off, and then does that until it gets old, and now they want to take away the one bloody thing that makes my life worth living? If it wouldn’t cause global destruction, I’d tell you to let them all suck hieter eggs and we’d better off for it!”
Dorjan closed his eyes against laughter. “One for me,” he said past the tightness of bruised ribs and healing stitches. “And one of those nightshirts you despise so much.”
“You think you’re going out there?” Taern stopped right in front of Dorjan as he was sitting up, and Dorjan couldn’t help his eyebrows arcing to his hairline.
“Don’t you look pretty,” he murmured and then tried to clear his head. “That depends,” he murmured, “on who it—”
“Master Dorjan!” chirped Mrs. Wrinkle from outside his door. “Master Dorjan? There’s soldiers down here to see you. They say that they tracked some sort of prowler to this neighborhood—I tried to tell them we haven’t seen anything, but they wanted to talk to the Forum Master himself.”
Dorjan took a deep breath and replied, “Very well. Tell them I’ll be down in just a moment, if they don’t mind cornering a man in a dressing gown!”
Taern gaped at him. “You’ll what?”
“Taern, if you could put on some fucking clothes and go ask the lady Krissa to let you into her room and then emerge in her own dressing gown as I pass, I would be much obliged.”
Taern glared at him, and then the logic started to permeate his outrage. “You can’t see more than my room from the bottom of the stairs,” he said, holding out Dorjan’s nightshirt. Dorjan took it, and Taern helped him throw it over his head.
“Yes,” Dorjan told him. “And it shall simply look as though I sent my mistress to her room to dress. I do hope she doesn’t mind—”
“She won’t. She can help you stand—it will look as though you’re simply an established couple. I understand.”
He most clearly didn’t like it, either, but he did put on a dressing gown and came over to shove his shoulder under Dorjan’s arm.
“C’mon, Nyx,” he muttered under his breath, and Dorjan pushed with all his strength. There wasn’t much. But together, they made it to the door. Dorjan leaned heavily on it while Taern slipped through, and Dorjan had to smile—he was running on his toes, and his footsteps did sound decidedly feminine. He didn’t knock, and Dorjan hoped that Krissa was ready for this, but he knew she was a quick girl, and rather thought she might be.
The door closed, and Dorjan leaned heavily on the wall and took a few steps, and then a few more, and finally, finally, made it to where Krissa stepped out of her room, looking resplendent in an obviously new dressing gown in a glorious wine-colored velvet with champagne-hued trim. It looked both decadent and innocent, and he smiled at her even as she offered him her arm.
“You look lovely,” he murmured. “A gift from me?”
“Yes,” she said back quietly. “One of my favorite kinds of wrapping!”
“Almost makes me wish I was the one opening the present,” he murmured sincerely, and she laughed—loudly, for the benefit of their guests—but also sincerely.
As they neared the top of the stairway, she leaned over and said, “Let’s see if we can stay up here. I’m not sure the two of us are going to make it down. I’m not that strong.”
“There’s always the railing,” he said tightly, “but yes. Let us see.” He looked down toward the foyer and was almost glad for the pain, because it kept him from reacting when he recognized the lokogos whose head he’d stepped on five nights previous.
“Lokogos,” he said, inclining his head and speaking genially. “Forgive me for not dressing to answer, but….” He smiled winningly and inclined his head toward Krissa, who simpered and blushed. He made a vow to buy her another dressing gown for that alone.
The lokogos was obviously not sly, given the way he almost swallowed his tongue when Krissa appeared, and Dorjan gave thanks for that. She moved innocently and exposed her ankle and calf; Dorjan thought there might not be enough dressing gowns in the world.
“I can see that, Forum Master, but this is important. Yer remember the ruckus, few days back, do ye?”
Dorjan blinked from the sheer understatement alone. “Well, I assumed there was a reason they didn’t ring the summoning bells, Lokogos, but that was, as you said, some days ago.”
“I know it. But we tracked some of what’s responsible to this quarter o’ the city, and we’re goin’ door to door to see if anyone saw or heard nothing… queer, that might not be our fugertives.”
Dorjan blinked again and dared not risk a look at Krissa. He could tell by the way she held her shoulders she was laughing so loudly inside it was a shame she couldn’t rock the chandeliers.
“Well, as luck would have it, we did see and hear nothing ‘queer’ from that night. Do you have any evidence that says your fuger, uhm, tives passed this way?”