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soldier
She’s going to kill him. She’s just going to kill him.
Servitors scatter as Gized strides down the hall, short legs bolstered by rage. The path is clear, all the other, saner guests occupied as they are with the victory banquet. By all rights Gized should be there with them: she may not have led the swarm to victory, but she stood at the right hand of the man who did. Surely that should earn her a night of uninterrupted fine dining. She heard the Andan chef is serving sunfish soup and candied juniper berries, which, Kel Zhien told her (their eyelashes lowered, their voice lower) some cultures consider aphrodisiacs. Ordinarily Gized would have them thrown immediately in the brig, but it was a long campaign, and Zhien has nice hands. Gized’s in a savoring mood: success. Food. Perhaps other things, too.
So yes, she should be in the banquet hall with her comrades drunk on the spoils of victory. Instead she is out here, alone, stone cold sober, chasing down the fox-fucking commander who delivered it.
“‘He’s probably just taking in the moment,” she mutters, hating her life with every step. “‘Give him a break’. When do I get a break?” The hallway doesn’t answer.
The bathrooms are empty. So is the bar- the ballroooms- the sparring hall (Jedao has on more than one occasion ditched celebrations to brawl with the infantry, but they were Kel parties, it was expected.)
Gized runs her hand through already-tousled hair, glowering at the map a helpful servitor is projecting. This is why she made him swear he would behave. He's never been good at politicking, but that's why he has Gized, who can fix his uniform and pretty up his speech and nudge him to make proper obeisance to all the heptarchs, even Khiaz’s squat bullfrog of an emissary.
And he'd promised he understood why tonight was so important, had sworn he'd act accordingly. Such a long-fought campaign. Such sweet-won victory. A colony saved from heresy. Nominal Kel losses.
How many colonists? he’d asked, and then fell silent at the answer, which Gized took for satisfaction.
It’s the first real, definitive victory of their dual careers, commander and second-hand, rising star and comet trail. Years of scrabbling, proving themselves to their lessers, and now finally the Kel, all the factions, have no choice but to pay them their due publicly. Finally, they crown Jedao with long-owed laurels.
She can see it in their eyes, in the way they wrap their mouths around his name. They’re all seeing what she did those long years ago, the outline of victory, just waiting to be filled in. He’s on the cusp of becoming something. Keep playing his cards right, and in a hundred years there won't be anyone in the heptarch who doesn't know his name. Maybe, Kel willing, Gized’s will be right there aside it.
If the man ever deigns to show up.
Not the canteens. Not the kitchens. Not the perfume-soaked grounds, where Gized allows herself a moment to admire the jasmine flowers in bloom. She’s about to throw up her hands and tell a servitor to put out the alert, when she hears noise up above, on the garden balcony.
“I fail to see your problem.”
“Don’t touch me.”
“Darling, please. Let’s stop with the histronics.”
"Fifteen thousand lives. Not heretics, fifteen thousand Kel. We bombed the planet after we won. There isn’t even dust left. That wasn’t in any of my plans, and I know it wasn’t in any of yours. So what did we get out of it? No one will tell me. Do you know?”
Gized is often accused of being overly Andan-natured, but it's pure Kel instinct has her ducking behind an abstractly-shaped topiary at Jedao’s voice. She hasn't heard him sound like this in years, not since those first battles, where she would often have to screen his message to Kel Command so that they didn't charge the whole moth with insubordination.
He’s calmed down recently, finally becoming accustomed, she’d assumed, to Kel methods of moral and mortal calculation. But now he sounds just as he did the first time he transmitted a request to delay bombing a colony so they could at least evaluate the children, a process of hours, not even days, and received back a curt (and to her thinking, justified) no.
Even in the privacy of his chambers, with servitors dismissed and screens dark, he doesn't speak to her this way. So who, in all the heptarchy? Who?
"If a few dead Kel can shake you so easily, I weep for the bigger picture. My dear, do you mean to unearth every corpse and deliver them back home yourself? Tear up those precious fingernails hauling bones up from the rubble? No? Then I suggest you move on.”
Gized is certain she’s never met the speaker, but she shivers instinctually; a predator knows its own kind. They can't be Kel, too polished, too posh, but Jedao’s Shuos friends deserted him after Khiaz, and the only people he speaks to so familiarly are either Gized or dead. So who?
Kel aren't known for subtlety, but her favorite parent was career Shuos, and that must count for something because Gized doesn't make a sound as she drops to her heels and creeps closer. She waits until she’s fully hidden behind a pillar before craning her neck to see. The balcony door, butter-yellow light pouring through the windows and turning the shadows weak. Jedao, uniform already rumped despite her earlier warnings, hands clenching and unclenching. And facing him, facing her-
A glimmer of gold at the fingertips. Oil drop pearls flashing at the ears. The most beautiful man Gized has ever seen, smiling the most beautiful smile Gized could ever dream, at her commander. At Jedao. The grip on his shoulder is proprietary, but Jedao, proud Jedao, bears it with only the slightest flinch.
“This was never supposed to be needless,” he says. The Nirai manages to make an eyeroll look posh. ”I don’t want it like this.”
“You should have decided to have morals back when we first discussed this. It would have saved us both a lot of headache.”
“It wasn’t supposed to go like this-”
“Too bad. There’ll be many more before this is done. At your command. On your - yes, on these precious hands.”
Gized has never heard Jedao sound like this. She never wants to again. “It’s too much to bear.”
"No?” The Nirai is still amused. “Steal your resolve, little fox. You’ll need something to believe in. It won’t be me.”
The sound Jedao makes is crumpled up-pathetic, not befitting a man of Jedao's status at all, but the Nirai just clucks soothingly, condescendingly. Gized can't make out his next words, but she understands the cadence - what people who haven't experienced it would interpret as 'kindness'.
Whether it’s from tone or the actual word, Jedao’s head tilts up (which under any other circumstances Gized would relish, Jedao’s taller than most Kel but the Nirai has inches on him, and makes a whole meal out of the languid stretch to his whole height.) Gized watches, wincing, as his mouth begins to move. Don’t insult his faction, don’t insult his fashion, don’t challenge a Nirai administrator to a duel.
But to her surprise the Nirai doesn’t immediately reel back and slap Jedao across the face. Nor does he storm off the balcony demanding him drawn and quartered. Whatever Jedao says - softly, softer than Gized has ever seen him - makes the beautiful Nirai reach out and (Gized shoves a hand against her mouth) cradle the softest part of Jedao’s jaw against his palm, the way a lover might.
She rockets back into the shadows, her heart racing. She’s never- She’d thought-
Since Khiaz, Jedao’s avoided public relationships with anyone. No Kel, of course, but also no off-shore romances or star-crossed pining. He’s been with others, close ship quarters means she’s unfortunately well informed on Jedao’s assignations, but they’re discreet, and never last more than a few nights. He’s married to his orders, the infantry say admiringly. He’s faithful to his duty.
But now, here, Jedao, her gunflint commander, her laser-sharp captain, lilts towards the Nirai like a man besotted. His eyes are lit up like Gized has never seen them lit up before, except for maybe down planetside knee-deep in the muck and the gore and the glorious heat of calendrical warfare.
Well. Well, she thinks (once she’s calmed down her breathing, once she’s given the figures on the balcony a final, lingering look: Jedao’s eyes closed, clutching the Nirai’s wrist as it’s a lifeline wire, the Nirai touching his hand, his shoulders, his neck, his chin, tilting it up, up, up, until, no, she can’t watch any longer, it’s Jedao; once she’s stolen back into the hallway, and stilled her galloping heart.)
Once she’s left them to their solitude, Gized thinks: well then, what if it’s a good thing? Now that the shock’s halfway worn off, she doesn’t hate the idea. When the Nirai speaks (whatever they’re speaking of, she doesn’t want to guess at Shuos-Nirai schemes), Jedao seems to listen. And when Jedao is listening, he’s not raging at casualties, or demanding time-wasting evacuations, or, worst of all, staring silent at lists of the dead.
She strides back towards the banquet, and Zhien, whose attentions she might now very much welcome, ordering her uniform crisp and neat. There’s a smile on her lips, a plan forming in her head. If Gized finds out where the Nirai is posted, she could perhaps suggest they pursue assignments closer to that region. For the sake of the heptarch, of course, nothing else, but if they happen to visit that research station more often than’s strictly needed…
A Nirai lover might be just what Jedao needs. Someone grounded, someone sane.
Someone to help guide him towards the right path.
shuos
Mikodez lets the technicians do the heavy lifting. He has a reputation to uphold. Besides, his hands are clean, and he'd like to keep them that way.
It takes three of them to keep the body upright. Reedy, sun-starved creatures they might be, but Kel Juhi is smaller. Mikodez watches them struggle without comment. In their spindly hands Kel Juhi sags with the weight of a much heavier creature, as if their bones have been shot-through with lead. Is it the weight of an aberrant soul, Mikodez catches himself wondering - but that's a Liozh thought, and he'd hate to have to turn himself in to Doctrine.
The few times he's delivered a body, he was received in chambers so opulently lush it seemed like self-mockery, red velvet couches and delicate tinkling fountains daring him to question why a research station would need all this excess (and which budget it’s coming out of). But he's never been here after. In the aftermath.
Now, they've been left waiting in what he assumes must be some sort of laboratory. Sparse by Kujen's standards, which probably makes it the height of normal Nirai luxury. Black matte floor, blank slate walls, the only viewscreen open on a field of dull, unmotivated stars. Empty workstations. Empty (for now) drains. Beneath the formaldehyde, there is the more familiar stench of blood.
Kel Juhi keeps bleeding. One of the technicians fidgets, trying to keep their immaculate boots clean, but they've underestimated how much blood a body has to give.
At least the Kel is quiet. They screamed the whole way here. Until today Mikodez hadn't known that there are whole sub-genres of screams, from keening animal noises to throat-rippers so loud they'd made Mikodez ache. When they were reviewing candidate profiles Kel Command favored Kel Juhi in part because of their reported circumspection, their poise. The creature Mikodez retrieved was a whole other species.
But now Kel Juhi is silent, and their eyes are dry, and dull, and old.
Mikodez's nose itches. He hates field work. Should have sent Istra, who'd appreciate the drama. Or Zehun, who might scare even Kujen.
And here's the bastard swanning in now, no trace of apology on his hideously perfect face, for all he left his fellow hexarch waiting for the better part of an hour. Mikodez quickly catalogs the whole of him, both because he hasn't retained his position this long by letting details slip, and also because Istra will inevitably demand all the dirty sartorial details. He wears the same body as the last time they spoke, although he's let the hair grow longer and he's threaded iridescent crystals through the braids, so that they chime like bells against each other when he moves. He moves like a dancer, but that’s the soul more than the body. He smiles like a cobra, and Mikodez checks for fangs.
Kujen’s kohl-lined eyes take in first Mikodez (he is gifted a grin, which appears genuine, Mikodez appreciates the effort), and then the Nirai technicians, who vanish with cowering thanks, and then finally the body, which is Kel Juhi.
Kel Juhi's head rests on their chest. Their wounds are oozing bloody. Mikodez didn't bother having them bathed before throwing them in the needlemoth, and so now they smell like the bottom of a week-old garbage heap, and have begun to look it, too.
"Darling," Kujen coos, and Kel Juhi moans.
Kujen tilts his head, peering down at the body. Mikodez, who's made a living out of reading emotion, couldn't name this one, except that he wouldn't put it anywhere near concern.
"Kujen," he says, when the silence has started to feel less contemplative and more calculated insult, "he needs to be recalibrated. He failed."
The edges of Kujen's expression sharpen. "Jedao doesn't fail. Do you? No, see? There’s nothing wrong with him."
At the name, Kel Juhi's body makes an aborted attempt at movement, trying to sway closer towards Kujen but then stopping halfway, so that they appear close to toppling. There was never a more graceful fighter than the Immolation Fox, Mikodez recalls reading, who could make you believe that the battlefield was a ballroom.
Kujen, sshing gently, cups the back of Kel Juhi's head. The noise stops.
"He did this time," Mikodez says, trying to ignore the way Kel Juhi has shifted to rest their head against Kujen's thigh. "Oh, don't look at me like that. I truly couldn't be bothered with Kel machinations, if I had time for another hobby it certainly wouldn't be this. But they're ready to send the whole swarm and blast you into the Gwa Reality, is how I believe the Kel hexarch so delicately put it. The only reason we're not in a Nirai-Kel war is my agreeing to play mediator, which I know you know I hate."
"There's nothing wrong with him," Kujen repeats, his thumb tracing Kel Juhi's delicate brow ridge as if it's a fascinating piece of machinery. "If a moth full of infantry won't take orders, then Kel command has much more interesting problems than me and my toys."
Mikodez thinks longingly of the airlock. "He didn't give orders, that's the problem. Look at the footage if you don't believe me - although I can't think of a single reason I'd have to lie."
Kujen snorts. "I looked at the footage, Shuos Mikodez. I don't see the problem. The mission was a success."
"Eight fangmoths lost. Two bannermoths. As I understand," Mikodez says mildly, "those don't come cheap.”
"'As I understand'," Kujen sneers. "The colony is still there. The heretics are gone. Are the Kel suddenly sentimental? Are they running out of ossuaries?"
His grip on Kel Juhi looks gentle, but his knuckles are white. Kel Juhi remains silent. Mikodez does not want to be in this room.
"He was blank for ten minutes, Kujen. You saw Kel Juhi's tests. They never should have been chosen, there's no command in them. Without Jedao, formation instinct broke, and now Kel Command is asking why we let him slaughter another 5,000 Kel. Their hexarch has me scheduled for three meetings tomorrow. I was going to go to the spa. Now I have to work. You know how mad that makes me."
Kujen isn't even listening.
It's probably because Kel Juhi - who is broken beyond repair, whose Jedao-less future is a swirl of medication and sedation, who in at least two ways a corpse - is speaking. And Kujen is kneeling down to hear.
"I tried," they're saying, "I froze, I'm sorry, I'm sorry." With every word their voice gains in strength, in intent. Mikodez thinks back to the cadet when they were first screened for this assignment. They could barely raise their eyes from to the floor, let alone their voice to a hexarch.
Mikodez feels the first stirrings of unease.
Kujen doesn’t make it any better: he's kneeling in front of Kel Judao, with their hands, crusted in foreign blood, held between his own. From anyone else, his grip could be called ‘delicate’.
"Oh, look at you, you're right back at the beginning, aren't you? Right back in the dark?” He sounds encouraging. “Let's let all of that go, sweetheart. Let go of all that Kel, can you do that for me, yes, there you go. I need their brain intact and you're hurting them. I thought you said you didn't want to hurt anyone anymore." A smile - he's teasing.
The sound Kel Juhi makes isn't really human, doesn't remind Mikodez of any animal, either, except maybe the runt strays who were too small to beg in the marketplace, and so would lie listless in the alley filth, resigned to but still afraid of dying.
Ah, Mikodez realizes. Jedao.
"Just let them back in," Kujen is saying. He must notice Mikodez's sudden stillness, but all his attention is on Kel Juhi- on Jedao, who's clutching a handful of seed pearl robes in his filthy hands, and who has begun to cry, big shiny tears which make his grubby face grubbier.
"Kel Juhi is already gone,” Shuos Jedao says, “I killed them right away. I’m sorry, I’ll atone, but don't make me go back. Please, you promised. I'm sorry I failed, but please don't make me go back in the dark. I'll be good.”
"I need their brain more than I need your goodness, darling." Kujen’s voice invites Jedao to see how unreasonable he's being.
Jedao's managed to pull himself to his knees, so that he can meet Kujen's eyes. Kel Juhi, who kept theirs firmly on the floor, never had the pleasure.
'He's only allowed a body of his own when he's been very good,' Kujen had promised - but who in their right mind would trust Nirai Kujen's definition of 'good'? How often does he let Jedao out? What freedoms is Jedao given? How long is his leash? Who holds it?
Kujen strokes Jedao’s hair. Jedao whines, not entirely painfully.
Mikodez does not want to be here anymore.
"Please, please," Jedao is whimpering, "I tried so hard. Don't make me go back."
"But General, you let all those poor Kel die." He laughs at Jedao's gasp, at Mikodez's silence. It isn't a pleasant sound, and yet Jedao still yearns towards it.
"I won't hurt them anymore. I won't. I won't. I'll be good."
"You've said that before." Kujen's voice is almost wistful.
"But this time it's true," Jedao promises, "I won't fight. I'll be good, for you."
Mikodez has overseen Vidola tortures. Shuos tortures. He's authorized actions many outside the Hexarch would deem atrocities, done so with a clear heart, and oftentimes a smile. Now, here, he tastes bile.
Kujen whispers something into Jedao's hair which makes him moan. His face is pressed into Kujen's chest, so Mikodez can't tell if it's with ecstasy or terror. For once in his life he's glad not to know.
By all technicalities Mikodez ranks above Kujen. But Kujen looks at him over Jedao's head, his eyes flashing, his knuckles stained with dead Kel blood. Jedao trembles so hard in his arms some of his ornates robe's pearls have been wrenched free and now lie scattered across the floor. Please, Jedao whispers to Kujen, please. Mikodez doesn’t know what he’s begging for, and he doesn’t want to know.
The Immolation Fox on his knees. The Immolation Fox begging. The Immolation Fox broken.
Kujen's expression isn't possessive, or even satisfied. It’s satiated.
When Mikodez leaves, he is silent. He doesn't have the words. He will not tell Istra about this trip.
ghost
There are many humiliations which come with being a body. The boy who is a moth who is a man could spend a lifetime cataloging them all and still not reach the end - which, considering his physiology, must say something about the human capacity for shame.
Jedao’s life is full of humiliations. Three weeks ago he was in the middle of lunch with Hexarch Mikodez when he bit down on a particularly spiky-tasting seed pod, and for the rest of the afternoon his lips were swollen to bullfrog proportions.
Three days ago he tripped over his shoes in the hallway and the guard with the shy dimpled smile who always smells like jasmine laughed.
Yesterday Heminola slithered out of the vents to find him silently weeping over a blotchy wine stain birthmark on his left hip which Kujen had not, for whatever reason, erased.
His feet get cold too easy.
In summer his skin turns dry.
But by far the greatest humiliation is surely this: the only nights he sleeps soundly are when he imagines that he is lying in the arms of the man who has damned every iteration of Shuos Jedao, in this lifetime, in past lifetimes, in all lifetimes.
He is lying in bed now, but he isn't sleeping. He's thinking about Kujen, and he's thinking about Kujen's hands.
This room is monitored, of course, which means that his guards and Mikodez, too (and Zehun, please, not Zehun), must all what he's just done. It’s the same thing he does nearly every time he's alone these days. No shame in it - that’s what the hygienic pamphlets which started magically showing up in his library a few weeks ago soothingly reassure him. He is, after all, a growing man/alien/war crime - it's a good sign, if you think about it from a very precise angle, that he's chasing these biological urges, and not any other procliviaties his DNA might urge him towards.
Jedao wants them all to see that he's making a good try of this being a real human boy thing. So he's made sure to flirt with both the jasmine-smelling guard and the Rahal seconded to Shuos Zehun (broad shoulders, easy smile, as far from Kujen as you could get), just enough to allay any concerns over who exactly he's been imagining during these discreet and not-at-all-monitored private moments.
Thankfully the Nirai haven't invented telepathy yet. If anyone knew who was really on his mind, they'd probably kill him all over again.
He’s having lunch with Mikodez in half an hour. He still has lesson plans to go over, letters to return, a very boring jigsaw puzzle to complete. As of a few minutes ago, he desperately needs a shower. But he’s comfortable, and he’s lazy, and he wants to torture himself. So he closes his eyes and he thinks some more about Kujen.
The bed is small, just big enough for one - whoever designed his room probably assumed nobody'd be stupid or brave enough to share even a fully neutered Jedao's bed. (That's not fair. Everyone has been very kind to him, or as kind as the Shuos can be.
He's so tired of kind.)
If Kujen was here they would have to both lie on their sides to make room, an ill-fitting jumble of hip and leg and jostling elbows; or maybe Jedao could make himself small, which he likes to do, and rest his head on what he imagines would be the softest part of Kujen's chest, where if he listened with all his senses he might be able to make out if there really was a heart beating somewhere, deep within.
Or maybe Kujen would be on top of him, the body he wore was slight but there had been the potential for violence, for force; to be a dancer is to have control. Kujen liked having control. Jedao was bred to cede it. Did Kujen make Jedao this way on purpose? Or was it in his blood to begin with?
He rarely thinks about his other self, the one which lives inside of Cheris and wants him to die almost as much as he wants it himself. But when he does it’s most often in connection with Kujen, and the black bile this conjures in his throat sometimes makes it hard to breathe.
Because he’s seen pictures of himself (himself?), from when he was older, more battle-scarred, more world-weary. And he understands why Kujen, who is a lover of all things fine and beautiful, would want the novelty. Kujen must have known his body well, to reconstruct it so precisely. Every inch of skin lovingly re-rendered, every hair spun to picture perfection.
Or did he give himself license to modify where modifications might be made? Maybe, Jedao thinks, with a rush of horrible cruel satisfaction, the other Jedao wasn’t so perfect, didn’t fit as well, didn’t make the right noises or bend the right way. Maybe he was too willful, too proud, too arrogant, and so Kujen set out to correct nature’s mistakes. Shaping Jedao to his precise satisfaction. Shaping Jedao to his desires.
- Lunch in 15 minutes. He doesn't want to be put in a Shuos dungeon. Think bad thoughts. Open sores. Scratchy sheets. Cold feet.
Deeper breath. Too deep. Too much air. Stop choking on nothing. He isn't even good at being human. He isn't even good at being a body. He doesn't even know what jasmine smells like, it's just a guess. He's never been outside. He's crying again. Why is he always crying?
The other Jedao probably never cried once. The other Jedao was strong, and good, and probably saw a thousand-thousand skies and didn’t think anything about any of them. Kujen probably wanted the other Jedao in a pure way, in a good way, free of any humiliation or needless cruelty; they probably touched each other with want pure, undiluted want, maybe even - the sob hitches in his chest - love.
The other Jedao probably made him happy. The other Jedao was probably happy.
But Kujen hadn’t built him for that.
When Jedao dreams - on the nights when he is in Kujen's arms, and Kujen isn't setting him on fire or cracking open his ribcage or pouring molten gold in his mouth to see how long it takes him to drown, Jedao asks: "You built me. Why didn't you make me someone you'd love?"
Kujen has a lot of answers. Most are said with a smile. Last night it was, "Darling, what would be the fun in that?"
(In his dreams, he turns to the other Jedao, who watches them with an unreadable expression, and he asks, “Why do I want this? Did you? Please, I don’t want to be alone with this. Please, I don’t want to love him alone.”
The other Jedao never responds.)
But he will spend the rest of his life alone with this gnawing, too-big-for-his-body love. The only other person who could bear it lives inside of Cheris, and she would rather carve his heart out than offer him absolution.
And maybe this is the real humiliation: he wouldn’t take it if she offered. Not if it meant losing Kujen.
The jasmine-perfume guard would never wind Jedao up and up and up until he was writhing from the inside, the tendrils inside his body squirming all over in alien-human humiliation, and then make him beg for more.
The broad-shouldered Rehal would never crack his brain open, no anesthesia, and make him beg to be turned nicer, more pliant, more pleasing, "Turn me better for you, turn me perfect for you."
Mikodez will offer him tea, and a smile, and a kind word. Always a kind word.
The future is filled with people who will love him gently and earnestly, who will never hurt him no matter how much he begs. The future is filled with sweetness.
He’ll choke on it.