But then, the unnecessary dangers of his homeworld had created Jahir, as well. One place, and it had been responsible for someone ready to reshape the universe to suit his ends... and someone who was ready to die rather than force himself on anyone.
There was a revelation trying to push through the edges of his ignorance, one struggling from the soil of their culture and the rarified echelons from which they both hailed, but though he tried he couldn't chase down his quarry. Frowning, Lisinthir queried the wall; it had been enough time for them to be alone together, find some equilibrium.
When he arrived, Jahir had already fallen asleep on the floor and Vasiht'h was beside him, facing him, his entire lower body curled as if in reflexive attempt to shield the Eldritch from anyone walking through the door. Two pacifists forced to the battle: it was enough to exhaust him with unwanted pity. Lisinthir prepared for bed and then stepped past them and onto the bunk. He didn't expect to be able to sleep given his agitation... but the moment he closed his eyes, he fell forward into a darkness that resolved into arms, hide, a chest breathing against his, calm after exertion. There was a glowing, irregular sphere hanging alongside them, projected from some computer Lisinthir didn't care enough to locate.
"So you were saying before we interrupted your lecture," Lisinthir said, eyes half-lidded.
"Yes." Good humor. Satiation. Indulgence. "See here. The Empire."
Lisinthir raised his head, reached for the wire frame and the colored cloud hanging in it like the gas of a nebula. Would it expand if he tugged it the way Alliance interfaces would? It responded to a flicked motion with curved fingers, as if he had dug claws into it and ripped it open. Seeing the glittering dust scattered through the colors, Lisinthir said, "Those are worlds."
"They are." The Emperor stretched a single talon forth, tapped one of the grid lines. It lit a glowing patch along one edge. "Here is the border."
That, at least, Lisinthir recognized, and the space immediately behind it, for he'd traveled through it to reach the Throneworld, which was, he saw, very close to the border compared to the rest of the Empire.
The rest of the Empire, which was... staggeringly large. Far larger than it had been on any of the Alliance maps. Lisinthir sank his fingers into one of the sectors and jerked, magnifying it. So many worlds...! And none of them known to the Pelted and their allies. The initial treaty the Alliance and Empire had signed had required both signatories to offer maps delineating their respective political boundaries, but this map looked nothing like those. "Did you lie? Or have you simply been very busy expanding?"
"Lying would have required us to believe you worthy of the truth." The Emperor rolled onto his stomach to free his wings, stretching them and then folding them against his spine. "But the answer is 'both.'"
No use arguing about it. From their perspective, the decision made perfect sense... it was the Alliance's trust that their enemies would honor their promises that struck the Eldritch as dangerously naïve. Nothing in the Alliance's arsenal had ever convinced the Chatcaava that they could make good on their threats, so why would the Chatcaava take them seriously? Lisinthir considered the map. "The Throneworld is nowhere near the center of the Empire. That seems nonsensical. In a polity so large, would you not want the capital to be equidistant from its edges? As much as possible."
"As much as possible is in fact impossible when the Empire is continually expanding." The Emperor tapped the map, a sequence with his fingers that reminded Lisinthir of the talon-activated comm interfaces. The variegated colors converged, became four distinct hues that divided the sphere into irregular quadrants. "For a long time, we ruled from our birthworld, here." A point very far from the border, nearly in the 'back' of the projection, granting that the Alliance-facing edge was the front. "But as you can see, we expanded coreward." The Emperor smiled. "You will like this, Ambassador. Some scientists posit that we can sense the galaxy's spin and are programmed to move away from that motion, toward relative stability."
"Do you think it's true?" Lisinthir asked, fascinated.
The Emperor rumbled his amusement. "Who could prove it? But it flatters our pride." He tapped the map. "So we moved coreward and ran into your Alliance and a fight, the only fight we'd had so far. That was the point where it was decided that the Empire needed to be ruled from closer to the front, and that is why you find the Throneworld so far forward. We are killers. Our leader must be a killer. Where else would a killer live, but close to the battle?"
A perfectly reasonable explanation. "So where you born here?"
"Me?" The Emperor laughed then, eyes narrowed. Through their skins Lisinthir felt memory moving, bitter and quick and cruel. "No... I am from near the homeworld. There, near the back of the Empire, where battles are few and worlds are poor. My sire died an unremarkable death as one of the lowest ranks in all the Navy—he had no title, even, only the name he was born with. He had all my angers, Perfection, but none of my ambition... nor, I fear, my intelligence."
"A father without ambition," Lisinthir observed. "How remarkable that must have been. My own was nothing but ambition, stitched together with resentment and fury." He turned the map idly, noting the size of two of the quadrants, far out of proportion to the others. "You made your start as your sire did, I imagine."
"I did. But I earned a title within weeks, and I let nothing stop me on the way to the throne." The Emperor was contemplating less the map and more Lisinthir's hand on it. As always, juxtapositions fascinated him. "The Emperor then was venal and incompetent and incurious, and I find all those qualities contemptible. To unseat him was a pleasing side effect to slaking my ambitions."
"You and your pleasing side effects, Exalted."
"Always." The dragon smiled, lazy.
"So these colorations... they split the Empire into four sections? These two are not equal in size, I suppose, because they expanded faster."
"They did. Those areas were richer: in worlds, in metals, in people, because in some places reproduction rates accelerated more than others." The Emperor stroked the largest of the quadrants. "Each of these quarters is overseen by a bureaucracy... and an arm of my Navy. My predecessor sourced his naval commands with people from the quadrants they were supposed to be policing, a policy I did away with for reasons you will probably intuit."
"I am only shocked your predecessor didn't."
"Yes, well. He is my predecessor for a reason." The Emperor grinned. "But it also amused me to see the impoverished worlds of my birth quadrant exercising their wills on their richer neighbors, and to consign the inevitable elitists of the wealthier worlds to dragging themselves through quiet backwaters without so much as an entertainment to distract themselves with."
Lisinthir glanced at him. "I have to imagine that breeds resentment."
"Oh, it does. To maintain this situation without its implosion, or fomenting rebellion, requires the constant shift of territory and personnel in and out of situations that challenge, reward, and punish them. The rich are bored on their cruises, but take some mean pleasure in exerting themselves on the system defense fleets of the poorer worlds who think themselves their betters. When their officers begin to cavil, I send them to some other task, some other sector. I give them a system rebellion to quash, a new region to explore and claim." The Chatcaavan's eyes had become distant; Lisinthir could feel the spirit flowing outward, opening, a dark flower blooming toward the light of a monumental task. He rested his face against the Emperor's shoulder, mindful of the wing-arm, and brushed his lips against it.
"It sounds a complexity."
"It was. And rewarding. One never rests, but one never grows bored."
"A little diversion now and then is a needful thing," Lisinthir said, kissing now. Come back to me.
"Now and then." The Emperor arched that wing around, its clawed tip trailing Lisinthir's flank.
Lisinthir narrowed his eyes until the political map became a vague glint seen through dense lashes... and then bit the shoulder until he tasted blood, an
d smiled as his lover lunged for him. Come back to me.
Stay with me.
Don't send me away—
He jerked up, the blankets falling from him and the air on his skin was too cold and too empty. His heart raced until his head felt the most tenuous leash on the pain pounding in it. He was sweating and desperate—
A hand gripped his, injecting a coolth as shocking as the analgesic. Jahir was up, stretching himself over the edge of the bed. "Here, cousin."
"Not enough," Lisinthir said, roughly. "It's not enough. Be what I need."
Wariness, sudden as pain springing up along the length of a laceration. Other things: fear, desire, professional concern. Too much. Lisinthir pulled his cousin onto the bed alongside him, ignored the fear and the wariness, stripped Jahir of his shirt and then dragged him close. He put his spine to the wall—safety, his mind whispered—and then tucked his cousin between his legs, Jahir's back to his chest. Folded his arms around him, rested his nose against the slope of the neck, bared by the braid. The skin against his slowed his heart... but it wasn't until his cousin's anxiety evanesced, left only trust and contentment, that Lisinthir felt his desperation fade. He breathed out loneliness, breathed in the smell of someone else's skin.
Jahir's voice was sleep-roughened, lower than usual. "You remain a surprising man."
Lisinthir smiled. "You thought my needs were as simple as someone to rhack?"
A flinch of skin, an interesting one. He didn't think Jahir would react to the Universal profanity. "I think if I have learned anything in the past days, it's that your needs are... complex."
Lisinthir wondered at his cousin's complexities. The epiphany he'd been hunting in the gym's locker room ghosted through his mind like the hint of an ice deer's hide amid the silhouettes of trees. "Have you divined the one I am feeding now?" he asked, curious.
Jahir looked down at the hand spread over his sternum, shifted his shoulders. Lisinthir half-closed his eyes at the sensation of shoulder-blades pressing against his chest. So strange, the lack of wings. Convenient, also.
"You have someone to protect." Through their skin, Lisinthir felt Jahir's wonder and drank it like tea-wine. He smiled against his cousin's neck. "That's what it is."
And because he couldn't resist, Lisinthir said, "It's also that I miss having someone to rhack."
"And was all your love-making violent then?"
"No, of course not. And not violent the way our sparring was."
Jahir grew very still.
"You didn't enjoy it." Lisinthir traced one of the collarbones until Jahir's breathing deepened again. "And I owe you an apology."
"No. You and Vasiht'h are right. I... give in too often. For fear of going too far."
Was that it? Lisinthir thought not, or at least not entirely. He nipped Jahir's neck to distract him and said, "I like this braid of yours. Very nonconformist. Was it an Alliance habit you picked up?"
"Ah, no. I always slept with it that way." A smile Lisinthir could hear in the words. "I scandalized my servant entirely."
"And your father, I imagine."
"I might have, had he lived to see me wear it. But I was barely out of gowns and my brother still in leading strings when he died." Lisinthir waited, expressing his attention through their skins. "A hunting accident. My mother mourned for...." Jahir trailed off, shook his head. "She still mourns, I think. They loved one another, and us."
The deer in the woods stopped, met his eyes across a moon-lit meadow. Lisinthir said, "You were presented at court at the usual time?"
"Yes." Faint curiosity, but his cousin seemed to believe this was in the vein of a distraction from Lisinthir's loneliness. "I attended the courts for a few years."
"And you left not long after you stopped."
Jahir nodded. "I did not perceive myself to be accomplishing much for the Seni."
The gleam of light off an arrow-head, the creak of the string as he drew. "So your father died and left you the man of the house."
"He did, yes." Jahir rested his head back on Lisinthir's shoulder, eyes closed. Lisinthir could just see them in the dim lighting, pale fringe of lashes against the slope of a cheek. "He took his duties very seriously and was greatly admired for his devotion to the family and those who owed us allegiance."
"And for how long have you thought yourself a disappointment to your mother, and a failure for not fulfilling your father's legacy?" Jahir's body tensed as if against a blow; so he was right. He gave chase to revelation, winding through the forests of their shared obligations. "The eldest son, the only one, who would be expected to marry to meet his family's need, went to court and was shown to all the eligible ladies of your station. None of them took the place of the cousin he could not wed. Duty required you to forsake your heart, but you could not bring yourself to embrace it. Best that you had not been born at all, then to bring to your family and House the shame the fulfillment of your desires would entail." Lisinthir gently kissed the nape of his cousin's neck and murmured, "How long have you been punishing yourself for not being your father?"
How still the world was, Jahir thought. How cold and quiet. The only real thing in it was the feel of Lisinthir's chest moving behind his, the hand resting on his heart, the distant sound of his own breathing.
"I..." He began, and could not continue. No denial came to his lips because none was possible. He remembered his father, distant, serene, gentle and stern... perfect in every way.
Lisinthir turned him gently until Jahir's shoulder was against his chest. Feeling the hand cupping his head and the other around his waist, Jahir said, "You are nothing like an Eldritch."
Lisinthir snorted, but it was a quiet sound. "I am everything like an Eldritch. I am merely not willing to be constrained by the stupidities that are strangling our culture. In particular our culture, the one that constrains us, noble heirs, male, expendable." The fingers were stroking along Jahir's cheek now, from bone to jaw, soothing.
"Not everything about our culture is stupid."
A pause then. Lisinthir sighed, kissed his brow. "And you would say so. Your parents adored you—I feel it in your skin, in your heart, and it wouldn't matter so much to you what they thought of you if they hadn't cared so much. You were wealthy. You had the Queen's favor. You even had a brother, and what family is rich in siblings? In every way, you were born beneath a favorable sun."
"And you, not," Jahir said, wondering why he was so calm. "So it troubles you less to cast it off if it doesn't suit you."
"There's my healer, emerging again." A smile in that voice. "But yes. I suspect so."
"I don't want to cast off my culture," Jahir said, soft. "I want to go back one day. Bring home all that I've learned. Help us to thrive. Do..." He stopped at the sudden knot in his chest. "Do honor to my family, and my House."
"And you will." How could such tenderness exist in someone so violent? What had he missed? A finger on his lip distracted him from his thoughts. "Not only will you, but you can do all that with your near-cousin at your side."
"Lisinthir...."
A smile, shadows accreting at the corner of a mobile mouth. "Will you argue with me? Mmm? Shall I teach you to believe me?"
Jahir ignored the ripple of gooseflesh that pricked up his shoulders. "Let us say I accept your hypothesis about the source of my self-destructive tendencies—"
"Is it hypothesis?"
His cheeks colored. "I think it a promising hypothesis. But let us say we accept it." He drew in a breath. "It won't change that these are patterns that were set in me very early, many of which are congruent with my personality. It won't change that my first instinct is not confrontation."
"No," Lisinthir agreed. "But as I told your beloved, yielding is sometimes strength. Adapting to changing circumstances requires willingness to accept and submit to their inevitability. The ability to compromise, which leads to detente and the fostering of diversity, comes with yielding. And trust..." Lisinthir met his eyes in the dark. "Trust is the ultimate strength."
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"Unless you trust the wrong person."
"Nevertheless." Lisinthir wound a finger in his braid, crooking his finger to pull it taut. An idle gesture, Jahir thought, but it made him achingly aware of the constraint on his mobility. "You have a task now, Healer."
"And that is?"
"You have seen the source of your grief and how it has shaped you. You've seen the weaknesses it made in you, and perhaps admitted to some of the strengths. Now it is your duty—" A sudden tug on the braid, "—to cultivate those strengths."
"Those being," Jahir managed, voice gone rough and soft.
"Your thoughts. Your mind. Your intelligence. Your ease with change; your openness to the new and unknown. Your emotional resilience. Your willingness to take on responsibilities beyond the needful." Lisinthir nudged his face to one side and the feel of warm breath on his neck scattered his thoughts, left him more open to the ones his cousin suggested were true. And wasn't the only reason he was fighting them was his belief that he couldn't possibly be the perfect son his parents had deserved?
God and Lady, but could all of this come down to a pale and frightened child standing at his father's open grave, watching the soil fall over the slope of a coffin?
"You don't think less of me," was what he fumbled to. "For not being better at the fight."
That won him Lisinthir's fingers digging through his hair to cup his skull, and a little shake. "How can someone so loved look so constantly for reasons to be unworthy of it? Cousin—you are a psychiatrist. Who among your clients has been so perfect? Why then do you hold yourself to that standard?"
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