[Icon description: a pot full of green onions growing. End description.] Sideblog for gritty adult sff, primarily a Machineries of Empire blog, but I use this to silo anything that heavily features gore, sexual abuse, and other heavy topics (although this blog is, generally, SFW). Expect untagged spoilers for MoE; will try to tag anything else with a short tag relating to the book/series title (e.g. "#baru cormorant"). Main: @ducktoothcollection. Call me Tooth, he/him.
the thing about the republic of two systems is that i am a softie and a breq apologist so i do want to believe that she succeeds in improving some things. however i also recognize that a) breq is a former imperial weapon who, in her own words, thinks she's learned to question that but hasn't learned as much as she thinks and b) even under the best circumstances trying to improve society somewhat is extremely complicated and often runs into massive logistical problems. so i feel like my ideal radch sequel would be set in the Ro2S but focused on marginalized citizens dealing with a government that is trying to be better about listening to them but often fails. i want imperfect solutions i want systems that end up hurting the people they're supposed to help i want people falling through the cracks i want it to be messy
I really love how misgendering is an act of colonial violence in the Imperial Radch universe.
Like when the Radch shows up and calls somebody "she" when they're not, it's not just getting their gender wrong, it's a statement that this entire part of their society doesn't matter and is going to be erased. And even when they gender someone "correctly", it's not any better. Because it's just the word that they're using, not a recognition of identity. It's insulting in a different way, and it must sting for the women who hear it and know that it's just happenstance that they're not being misgendered.
And it's constant. We talk about other people constantly. There's no escaping that violence when talking to the Radchaai.
And even when a Radchaai is trying to be respectful, they are so bad at figuring out gender that they constantly get it wrong, so even someone trying to be respectful is a reminder of the way that this imperial force erases identity and culture.
Analyst Shuos Liis, who studied Cheris while smiling languidly. She had lavish ripples of dark hair framing a heart-shaped face, and a beautiful mouth, but not a kind one.
"Don't worry," Jedao cynically. "You passed."
"Passed what?" she asked, using subvocals.
"Tell you later."
...
Shuos Liis was watching her with knowing eyes. Cheris wasn't immune to the woman's striking beauty, but she desperately wanted to know what test it was she was passing, and what Jedao knew about Liis.
...
"General," Liis said. Her eyes were deferential, but her voice was not. "Why the Immolation Fox and not some other weapon?"
"I looked at his record," Cheris said. She turned away, not wanting to invite further questions.
"Still passing," Jedao said.
...
"I wasn't specific enough. She's been surgically altered to resemble Shuos Khiaz, who was a heptarch during most of my lifetime."
"And this is a test?"
"Not for you. For me. If we were more closely linked, you might have shown a particular reaction. She hasn't gotten that reaction, so that's a point in your favor."
He was being awfully vague about--she figured it out. "You did what with a heptarch?"
"Subvocals, please." His voice was as cold as a knife's edge. "It's a reminder, that's all. I'm a Shuos, but I'm currently Kel property because Heptarch Khiaz signed me over to Kel Command after Hellspin Fortress."
Speaking of scenes that hit different on a re-read. The first time, I thought, and Cheris appears to as well (and I think Jedao subtly encourages or at least allows this interpretation) that he had an affair with Khiaz, and the reaction that the Shuos are looking for is arousal, or at least significant personal interest.
On the re-read, of course, we know that Jedao has just been presented with a person wearing the face of his rapist from four hundred years ago, and everyone in that group of Shuos knows it, because they're all looking for a reaction. This is one of the first moments we see him get sharp with Cheris, when she makes that comment--"You did what with a heptarch?"--out loud in front of the Shuos, who will guess that she is talking to Jedao.
What reaction they were looking for, he never says exactly. Fear, maybe, or disgust, a flinch, revulsion. Not only do they not get it, he doesn't even seem surprised by this ("cynically") and at least he doesn't present any sign that he's been ruffled by it. Have they done it before? How many times have they put him and his anchors through this test? What happens to Liis when their little "gotcha" moment is over? Does Kujen know, was he involved? Mikodez at least must have approved this, if not set it up himself (In this same conversation, Jedao remarks that Mikodez disapproves of him even more than the other hexarchs, and will surely have him executed for real if Jedao is returned to the Shuos.)
Neither does he ever say exactly what the reminder is (a reminder, presumably, from Mikodez), but I would assume something about his own lack of power, both personally and vis-a-vis the empire. Here is both a reminder of a time when he was personally abused by his superior officer, as well as evidence of how easy it is for the hexarchate to twist his arm, just to see his reaction. As if he needs that, after centuries in the black cradle with Kujen as his only point of contact.
Baru is a savant at field hockey. A once-in-a-lifetime talent midfielder. On Taranoke, everyone fights over who will get Baru Cormorant on their team. No matter what the rest of the team is like, Baru's canny coordination between offense and defense always brings out the best in her teammates.
But field hockey isn't a respected sport in the Empire of Masks. They don't even have proper leagues. And her friend Aminanta points out that field hockey players have a reputation for being notorious tribadists. (She got a sour look on her face when Baru pointed out the navy had that same reputation.) It does trouble her, though. She's a student-athlete who dreams of going to Falcrest to look at different stars through the most advanced telescopes in the world. What if the sport's reputation holds her back, no matter how well she performs on the Imperial Service exam?
Some people say that she should stick with field hockey. Stick with what she knows, and stay on Taranoke. But Falcresti talent scout Cairdine Farrier sees potential in her as the missing piece in his federated ice hockey team, which will represent Aurdwynn in a friendly exhibition match against an all-Falcrest team.
So Farrier whisks her off to Aurdwynn--the best place in the world to learn how to take her field hockey skills to the ice. (Well--the best place safely under Imperial control, anyway.)
Offensive Striker Tain Hu isn't impressed by this girl who's never even played on ice before. At first Baru thinks she hates her. Slowly, she comes to realize that politics are at play. That Duchess is maneuvering to be Team Captain, and is afraid that the team newbie will reflect poorly on her, if she can't get her skills on the ice up to par.
But it runs deeper than that. The Duchess chafes at representing the empire in any way. She doesn't want to be team captain in this foolish exercise of soft power. She wants to be a team player in the confederation of duchies--ruling independently, with no Governor, no Imperial Agents.
This revelation happens after Farrier sends Baru off to Tain Hu's lands in Duchy Vultag. Of course her duty is to report treason. But she's isolated from any other loyal imperial citizens. And Tain Hu is teaching her ice hockey, to present a convincing front for Cairdine Farrier until it's too late. Tain Hu says she's talented. She says Baru shows promise. And sometimes, when Tain Hu corrects her stance or her grip, her hands linger...
The more they work together, the more Baru learns of the reclusive duchess. Part of Tain Hu's rejection of the Empire is the rejection of Incrastic thought. She plays for the other team off the ice, too.
The only remaining question is ... which team will Baru play for?
[Smash cut to montage of sweaty ice hockey practice and indoor calisthenics, with increasingly longing looks, which eventually escalates to a montage of Tain Hu introducing Baru to tribadism, and Baru displaying savant-like aptitude in this arena, as well.]
Explaining Machineries of Empire calendrical rules by saying “if it was during daylight savings time, and you drove into one of the states where they don’t observe it, your car would immediately explode”
The fact that moth!Jedao, deprived of all memories of Kujen and what Kujen did to him and to the hexarchate, with Kujen making his hardest sell on being Jedao's best friend and ally, still determined within a few weeks/months that Kujen was a sadistic tyrant and the world needed him to die sure says a lot about Kujen
Pairing: N/A there's sex with an OC but it's not romantic
Summary: Jedao wanders off and makes a friend.
AN: This is so self-indulgent I almost didn't post it. Anyway Jedao is pathologically lonely and everyone hates him so he needs to talk to a stranger. And I need to see him cry.
AO3 | Pillowfort
He had meant to spend it at the library, as he’d said he would, but most people did research on their augments these days, and it was far harder than he had expected to shut himself up in a quiet study when the entire world was beyond. That, he should have anticipated, based purely on how often, since returning to a physical body of his own, he found himself utterly captivated by things like motes of dust floating through a beam of light or playing the same song fifteen times in a row at a volume which warranted Cheris coming into his quarters to tell him it was audible in the hallway. It was incredible what experiencing things first-hand could do when you were used to a) nothing; or b) second-hand experiences.
Wandering off was certainly a bad idea, in that it was going to piss off a lot of people, but Jedao breathing pissed off a lot of people these days. Brezan and Khiruev had argued strenuously (in the case of the former) or more diplomatically (in the case of the latter) that he should not be loosed on the city unaccompanied. Cheris had declined to web him to the ship for the duration of its docking.
Then again, based on the experience of the last ten minutes, which he has spent standing on the corner outside the library, trying not to grin like a lunatic the entire time as he drinks in the standard experience of standing on a street corner, he might not actually get very far in his bid for an evening of freedom.
There is a breeze on his face! There is the warmth of a star on top of his head! There is a pair of children (siblings, presumably) singing some inane ditty which under other circumstances would have been irritating but presently is joyous! He can smell something fried nearby!
He had found being onboard the shipintoxicating after four centuries of undeath. This feels like he’s snorted a fatal amount of the hexarchate’s most restricted stimulant and is enjoying an aneurysm-inducing high before his heart gives out completely. Not the worst thing that’s ever happened to him.
Eventually, though, curiosity presses him on, wandering aimlessly down the street. Out of habit, he is tracking his own path, so he can find his way back to the starting point, but the better part of his attention is taken up with everything else. Even when he was permitted access to his anchor’s five senses, which was rarely, it had not been like this. He hadn’t realized it then, because he felt them in comparison to the absence of feeling in the black cradle or in his standard anchor arrangements, but he realizes it now, as someone bumps past him and he feels the scratch of their coat on the back of his hand, a feeling which stops him up for at least a full minute of contemplation.
Exploring is fun for roughly two hours, at which point it’s growing dark. Then it starts to become exhausting in its own way. He is not used to having to process this much information anymore, not the least of which are the signals of his own body, and he pauses on the walkway to look around in more than a heady daze. Perhaps there is some quiet store or something he can duck into for a moment, let his fevered mind rest—
“Well, aren’t you a cutie?” Jedao turns his head towards the voice on reflex, but when he sees the woman looking directly at him, he realizes the words were intended for him, a truly baffling proposition.
She’s on a porch, a few steps above where he’s standing, leaning against the railing. She’s dressed in a sheer pink robe, open in front, and various mismatched other delightfully silken things. No shoes.
He takes another look at the building. Chintz and dark décor, vague and discreet signage. He’ll take a guess at what it is. What a serendipitous turn of events, surely!
“Are you lost?” she asks before he can open his mouth to reply, turning over a small device in her hand. The movement draws his eye and for a moment, he’s seized with a panic that he can only define as Kujen, Kujen—But while it is true that Kujen could be anyone, Jedao must forcefully tell himself he is unlikely to be this person. For one, he has never preferred womanforms. It wouldn’t be entirely unlike him to try, just to catch Jedao by surprise…but he can only tolerate so much paranoia.
“Not at all,” he says pleasantly. “I think I might be exactly in the right place.” The implication of a smile flickers across her face.
“Looking for someone, maybe?” she suggests.
“Found someone, maybe,” he counters, clasping his hands behind his back, turning on his heel to face her fully. She smirks. He can’t peg her ancestry, but that’s no surprise, given how little information he actually has about the world as it stands. Her hair is light brown, cut short, and her eyes a muddy brown. She isn’t exceptionally beautiful in any way, but Jedao has been in a sensory deprivation chamber for most of the last four centuries, and he thinks he can be excused for the way his heart skips a beat when she smiles at him like that. She leans further over the railing, pressing her breasts up more prominently. He is not certain that this is incidental.
“That’s some accent you’ve got,” she says, and it’s astounding to consider she sounds simply playful, not like she’s caught him for court-martial (again). There’s a hooded look to her eyes that makes blood seem to run faster. “Where’s that from?”
“Oh, somewhere out of the way,” Jedao said delicately. “Nowhere important.”
“It’s darling,” she says. “Sexy, even. Why don’t you come over here and we’ll talk a little more, hm?” She straightens up off the railing and moves over toward the stairs with what is undoubtedly more sway in her full hips than is necessary. That knowledge does not stop Jedao from staring, or mounting the steps to the porch.
“Office job, huh?” she says, gesturing at her neck, indicating the scars creeping up over the collar of Jedao’s uniform, which is purposefully vague. Up close, Jedao can smell her soap, or perfume, or spermicide, or whatever is on her. He inhales deeply; weeks into being back into a body have not stopped surprising him with how much he had missed simply having access to his own senses.
“You should have seen my face,” he says cheerfully. “Before they put it back together.” There’s a sharp laugh from the side, and he realizes there’s another person on the porch, draped on a cushioned bench and cradling an icy glass of something.
“I love it when they have a sense of humor,” says the other person, before turning their attention back to something spread over their lap.
Jedao tests a little smile to the woman in front of him, and she, at least, does not recoil from him.
“They did a mighty fine job,” she says, grabbing his chin and wiggling his face a little. “You’re adorable.” Maybe she’s lying, because she senses a sucker on the line, but he’s delighted anyway, although he does gently remove her hand from his face, because it remains difficult to countenance being touched so casually. “You want to come inside?”
Foxes and fucking stars yes, Jedao manages not to say.
Instead, he gestures towards the open door. “Lead the way,” he says.
“Now don’t be shy,” she says as she beckons him into the building. As he steps over the threshold, he has a moment of thinking he is behaving like a cadet on his first shore leave, but he brushes the thought away. The interior is dimly lit and darkly furnished; the front desk is empty. Jedao pauses to slide off his shoes and place them on the rack with several other sets: a pair of pearl-studded slippers unsuitable for walking even a single city block; several pairs of sleek black flats appropriate for many corporate officers and practical for casual city walking; two pairs of sandals, one visibly more worn than the other; and— “I don’t mind a talker, and I like the sound of you.”
“I’ll say whatever you want me to say,” Jedao promises. “I can talk all night.” She really oughtn’t test him—he’s been more talkative in the last few weeks than he’d been in most of his life before going into the black cradle. Cheris has been impressively patient about it.
(On those rare occasions he was granted enough control over his anchor to speak normally, it had happened, and Kujen, when he was particularly patient—which was usually the case when he had permitted such freedom of control—had indulgently tolerated it, mostly, Jedao thought, so he could later tease Jedao about how much he talked.)
“Oh, yeah? Me too. I’m a great ventriloquist.” Jedao blinks at her. “You know,” she says, a look of coy glee dancing onto her face. “Talking with my mouth full.”
A laugh bursts out of Jedao and he’s fairly sure he would be flushed, if he hadn’t trained that reaction out of himself a long time ago. It was necessary to surviving Shuos Academy. For a heartbeat, he was sorry about it.
“Can you?” he says, his lips quivering trying not to grin. “That sounds like a fascinating trick. Maybe you’ll show it to me?”
“Happy to. What do they call you?” She smiles again, more than anyone has smiled at Jedao since he woke up back in his own body. In fact, this may be the first time, except a few of the pained but encouraging little smiles Cheris has thrown his way when it becomes excruciatingly apparent everyone else in the room wishes he wasn’t in it.
“The Immolation Fox,” he says serenely, and she has the expression of someone being faintly amused by a tasteless joke.
“Oh yeah?” she says. “Should I call you Jedao?” There’s a moment when her eyes flicker to the sides, as if to check and see if anyone heard her making such an uncouth remark. It can’t be the worst thing a client has expected her to laugh at.
“You certainly can,” he says, although truthfully he would rather hear her call him cutie again. It’s such a harmless word.
“Well, Mr. Immolation Fox, are you looking for company?” She cocks an eyebrow and it has the effect of a hook into his guts, pulling him in.
“I am,” he says, but the words come out so much softer and more genuine than he really meant them to do. No one in the Compact—or indeed, anyone who knows him at all—wants to do anything but put a bullet in his head. It has a way of making him miss Kujen, which has a way of making him want to hurl. Wasn’t there some saying about the comfort of a familiar pain? He approaches slowly, suddenly hesitant. “What should I call you?” he asks.
“Daliah will do,” she says, seizing his hand. Jedao has no control over the way he jerks back from the touch as if she’s tried to burn him. There’s a flash of surprise on Daliah’s face, before whatever practice she has in ignoring customers being fucking weirdos kicks in and makes her unruffled again.
“I apologize,” he says quickly. “You surprised me.” Daliah is appraising him and he does not like to think what she can read in that one little reaction.
“We’ll go slow then, how’s that?” she says, and holds her hand out palm-up, inviting him to touch her, but not making a move herself. ,Jedao takes her hand, silently kicking himself. “I can keep you going for hours,” she boasts as she takes him up the stairs. It’s Jedao’s turn to snort.
“I doubt that. While your skills are no doubt immense, mine are quite out of practice.”
“Wow, honesty? I’m not used to that,” Daliah replies and gives his hand a little squeeze, which makes Jedao’s heart sigh. They are playing a game; she is pretending to find him charming and he is pretending not to know she’s pretending, but it’s a façade he needs so badly he will play his part with all his heart, trusting that she will play hers too. “Don’t worry; I’ll get you taken care of.” To be touched by someone who isn’t repulsed by him—
He barely has the wherewithal to notice the building around him or much more than the general direction (and the number of doors they pass by, all closed) in which she’s leading him by the hand until she pushes open a sea-blue door and then, more importantly, closes it behind them. Suddenly, he is tooaware of his body in ways he is no longer accustomed to: the hammering of his heart, the rush of his blood, a tingling in his fingertips, a dryness in his throat he only just noticed, and the limited quarters within which he is standing with another person. The distance from him to her, between him and the door, feels etched into his brain. Tension coils into his limbs, as if an attacker might burst through the window across from the door at any moment. His fingers are twitching for his gun, which no one has given him back since he was physically restored. Maybe they were right not to.
At once, he thinks perhaps he made a mistake.
Daliah is smiling, sashaying around in front of him; he turns to keep her in view more out of habit than interest.
“You want to touch, or you want a show first?” she asks, letting her sheer robe slip off her smooth shoulders. Jedao’s brain is taking too long to process any of this. There is too much of him focused on whether or not this is a trap. “You’ve got me feeling awfully underdressed, you know,” she says with a little moue when he doesn’t answer, gesturing at his uniform. She’s in front of him again, hands hovering over his chest, but not touching. “Can I give you a hand?”
“Of course,” he says, because what else would he say? Her fingers are already skipping down his buttons, exposing the shirt beneath his jacket; mindlessly, he shrugs the jacket off and tosses it aside.
It is impossible to feel her hands on him and not feel Kujen’s touch. Four hundred years. More than that—more than that since anyone but Kujen had touched him. Since he had been touched in his own body, without the veil of another between him and the contact. Since anyone but Kujen and his anchors had heard his voice, heard anything he had to say.
Are you there? Can you hear me? It’s so dark.
Daliah is helping him out of the shirt; he is barely aware of how he lifts his arms and bends to make her job easier. It’s followed by the undershirt.
He is a twisted knot of disgust and desire and fear and yearning; he wants Daliah to dig her fingers in and unknot him as much as he wants to push her away from him and go back to curling around his pain like a wounded dog. He feels slightly nauseated.
She drops his shirt graciously on the bench at the end of her bed and he reaches for her waist, pulling her in until he feels the warmth of her skin through her thin clothes against his bare stomach, a feeling he was once familiar with which now makes him lightheaded. She’s looking at him, studying him, waiting to see if he’s going to panic again if she touches him. She’s not much shorter than he is. Then she ghosts her hand over the scars on his chest and shoulder, tracing along the crooked paths of warped tissue. Kujen had wanted him to get the scars modded away. Jedao refused.
Daliah holds his gaze a moment before she leans in and he feels the wet press of her lips against his chest, against his scars. He can’t fully suppress the noise that scrapes through his throat, and this close, she can surely feel how he’s already half-hard, has been since she first smiled at him downstairs.
Daliah, true to her word, moves slow, inching up to his collarbone, to his throat, with lips and little flicks of tongue and the occasional brush of teeth, before she draws back to look into his eyes. There’s a little red cluster of budding pimples next to her left eyebrow. He can’t tell if he’s shaking or not.
When she kisses his mouth, a deep, gentle press of soft flesh against his, he would have liked to say he didn’t completely fall apart and throw his dignity down into the gutter where whatever remains of it could be swept up by the street cleaners in the morning, but it isn’t true.
He starts crying immediately.
There’s a moment right after it starts, when he thinks he can swallow it down and play it off, and Daliah will undoubtedly be professional enough to let him pretend he’s getting away with it, but when he has to draw back, before she ends up drinking his tears by accident, her left hand curls up a little on his chest, and the look on her face is so—so—there is nothing there but human concern, and she does him in completely.
She looks at him like he’s a person and it feels like being flayed alive, intolerable.
I’m your gun.
He turns away from her, breaking her grip, and he can feel Kujen’s hands tight around his chest, and he can feel the nothing, the endless silent empty dark all around him the vacuum of nothing the years and years and years and years and years and years and years and years and years and years and years and years and years and years and years and years and years and years and years and years and years and years and years and years and years and years and years
and years and years and years and years and years and years and years
and years and years and years and years
and years and years and years and years and years and years and years and years
and years and years and years and years and years
and years and years and years and years and years and years of it.
And he chokes, because he has been iron for so long, and thought he could get away with exposing just a small part of his flesh without revealing anything else and he was wrong. Once again, he has miscalculated.
He is trying to apologize, he thinks, but at this point he is crying too hard for that to be intelligible, and Daliah is wrapping her robe back around herself to offer him the dignity of not bawling in front of a woman with her tits out, for which he is obscurely grateful.
She puts her hand on his back and when he doesn’t throw her off, she rubs gently, which makes him think of being a child, and does not help him stop the meltdown he is currently having.
“Oh, sweetie,” she says softly. “Why don’t we sit down, huh?”
He would have liked to have said “No, thank you, that’s so kind of you, but I should go and get back to the work I told my colleagues I would be doing” and put his clothes back on and left, but what he does is let her lead him over to the bed like a pathetic infant, still, humiliatingly, trying to apologize and still, mortifyingly, being completely unintelligible. He isn’t even sure he’s speaking high standard.
He would have just sat there with his hands laying stupidly in his lap and an uncomfortable prostitute sitting next to him on the bed, but Daliah presses on his far shoulder a bit, enough to nudge him to lean over, and it is somehow better crying into her sweet-smelling shoulder. Possibly because she can’t see his miserable face this way.
He’s lost track of what exactly he’s crying about, just the sense that there’s a great big ragged hole in him that can never be repaired; or perhaps the feeling he shouldn’t be alive at all, and everything would be better if he wasn’t; or maybe because he has no friends and he’s so tired; or possibly because Dahlia’s bedroom smells like gardenias and he had forgotten how wonderful that smell is.
“It’s alright,” Daliah murmurs, and if she’s only pretending for the sake of her job, it’s forgiven, because he needs the pretense. “You’re alright, you go on ahead. No sense holding back.”
Somehow, this is what he needs to get a grip and start forcing his breath to steady, as much as he can.
“This was not my plan,” he says thickly, face still hidden against her, and Daliah’s shoulders quiver.
“I didn’t think so,” she says. “Let me get you something.”
The only thing more embarrassing than being handed a tissue by a prostitute would be having to try to kiss her with snot all over his face, so he takes it wordlessly and thoroughly blows his nose and tries to tell himself other people have surely done more embarrassing things in front of her. Probably.
He doesn’t mean to make her touch it after, just balls it up in his fist, but she pries it out and tosses it in a wicker bin by the dresser. He feels he probably ought to apologize for that too, but maybe if he says nothing, they can both forget it happened.
He can tell by the way Daliah hovers around him she isn’t sure what to do next, but she eventually settles on easing back down, cautiously, onto the bed next to him, one leg tucked under her. He doesn’t look up. The smell of whatever chemicals she’s wearing wafts around him and manages to still be enticing even now. One of her hands reaches tentatively for his, lightly tracing a fingertip up and down his hand. Her nails are cut short, painted with something that shimmers, and he guesses she picks at her cuticles.
“You want to stop?” she asks in the kind of voice that you might use if you were speaking to an individual composed mostly of toothpicks and children’s nontoxic paste. Jedao raises his eyes, the concept of being spoken to so delicately helping to shake him back to reality with its ridiculousness.
“No,” he says. “I really don’t. It’s just…” He draws in a long, fortifying breath and exhales it. “It has been a long few years.” He almost laughs at his own little joke. A few years.
“I understand,” she says, all sympathy, touching his hand a little more firmly now. “Sometimes it hits you all at once, huh?” He nods slowly.
“Sometimes it does,” he agrees, relieved at how steady his voice is again.
“Sometimes a distraction can be helpful,” she posits, sliding the robe off her shoulders once again, a movement that entrances Jedao. She’s rising up on her knees now, and he helps guide her onto his lap where he is, shamefully, almost immediately hard again, notwithstanding his face still damp with tears.
Centuries, he reminds himself.
He pushes Daliah down on the bed and she gives a little noise of surprise, which he swallows with a kiss, the second he has tasted with his own mouth in nearly half a millennium. When he pulls back, she’s smiling again, and the sight of it is a cool glass of water in an endless desert; he drinks it in with reckless abandon, as if it is for him.
“Are you ready to play, Jedao?” she asks teasingly, and she says his name like it’s a sharp-edged joke between the two of them.
“I am,” he says, and moments later, is on his back, and everything else fades away.
He wasn’t wrong, though, that he is out of practice, and the whole first affair does not last eight consecutive minutes, although he considers it a very enjoyable eight minutes.
But he’d warned her, and after, when he’s lying in her bed, she cards her hands through his hair, petting him like a cat, and is almost nicer than the orgasm. His eyes are sliding shut, just for a minute, when something starts pinging his augment, and he gives a long sigh.
“I have to check this,” he says, sitting up. Unfortunately, he is not the sort of person who can afford to ignore messages. He accepts it audio-only, which is good, because Daliah gives him only seconds before she starts walking her fingers up his bare thigh, and he isn’t sure his eyes aren’t still red from earlier, which is frankly worse.
“Where are you?” Cheris’ voice bursts into the tranquility of Daliah’s room. He can hear the sound of someone else around her, speaking in a complaining sort of tone, which makes him decide it is most likely Brezan, who would put Jedao on a leash with blinders on if he could. Or just shoot him, ideally, probably.
“Physical location, or mental state?” Jedao asks.
“You said you were going to be at the library.”
“I was, but there were more interesting things outside,” he says, which is all true.
“J—I need to know where you are,” Cheris says seriously.
“I think you’re overreacting,” says Jedao. “I’m not that much of a liability.” It wasn’t as if people were leaving threshold winnowers lying around the gutters for him to pick up and play with. He doesn’t say that though, because that’s the sort of thing that makes people nervous, and makes Cheris remind him that everyone else, and not just her, can hear what he’s saying nowadays. “Here, I’m sending you the location now, for your peace of mind. You’re welcome to come and join me if you like.” He pings his exact coordinates to her augment.
“This is a brothel,” she says after a moment.
“Yes, it is,” he agrees.
“I’m not coming to join you at a brothel.” Jedao shrugs.
“Your loss.” He thinks she could probably use the distraction. “Then I’ll see you when shore leave is over.” There is a pause here, and then he’s sure he catches the sound of Cheris sighing.
“Just be careful, okay?”
“I’ll pass the message on,” he says. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” He ends the call. The entire swarmis queasy up to their eyeballs at the thought of him running around unchaperoned. Cheris’ anxiety is not unexpected, but she could have pressed a great deal harder to try to make him come back.
Jedao is not keen to trade Kujen’s harness for one of the Compact’s making.
But Cheris let go. He wonders if, having his memories, she can accurately imagine how grateful he is for that. He wonders, often, just how many of his memories she has. He’s afraid to ask.
Something to think about later. For now, he turns back to Daliah, who has a little smile tugging at her lips anda charming little gap between her front teeth, and is quite willing to pull him into her arms a second time. And a third. And half of a fourth, before it becomes apparent he is worn out.
Then she lets him lay with his head in her lap while she strokes his hair, having abandoned stroking other, now less responsive parts of him.
“You really are a cutie-pie,” she says. “Never had anyone try to tell me about political theory while that far into my cunt before. Not well, anyway.”
Jedao huffs a little and traces a circle on her plush thigh with one finger, raking his nail lightly over the furrows of stretchmarks there. It’s so far from the most embarrassing thing he’s done lately that he can let it pass. Besides, she said she wanted to hear him talk—she never said what about. Jedao is a sucker for someone interested in something he’s explaining, and Daliah is good at feigning interest.
“Life is too short not to multi-task,” he says. Daliah’s fingers tug at his thick black hair and his eyes are half-lidded. Her hand moves down to his back, fingering over other scars there, scraping just enough to send little frissons of pleasure up his spine. Perhaps someday the newness of all this will wear off again, and he won’t react like a teenage boy to the slightest brush of fingers, but for now, he’ll enjoy it.
“Do me a favor?” she says.
“Mhm?”
“Call me ‘darling’ in that sweet accent of yours?” Jedao makes another quiet sound of amusement and lifts himself up off her lap, looking up at her from under dark lashes.
“Anything you want, darling,” he says, and feels an unreasonable prick of pride at how obviously pleased she is.
He ought to return to port. It would put Cheris and everyone else at ease to have back in hand, under supervision. But there isn’t a chance in hell he’s going to do that. Not when he could stay here and pay extra to have a warm, willing body beside him in the dark, and the trusting gaze of someone who has no idea who he is.
Cheris has been telling him since he took physical form again that he needed to sleep more; he didn’t disagree, he loved the idea of sleeping after so long without it, but in reality it proved harder to achieve than expected. Somehow it was easier to stay up researching everything he’d missed in the last four centuries. This, combined with the general exhaustion of having a body, meant that when he did slow down for too long, his energy tended to shoot straight down to zero. That is why he is still lying inert in Daliah’s bed even when she’s gone off to bathe and dress for bed.
He’s going to kill Kujen; of course he is. There’s nothing else to be done. That was why Kujen had tried to kill him, because he knew that with Cheris, Jedao had less than no need of Kujen, and he disliked the probability that Jedao might keep to his word. I’ll never forget what you are. Hadn’t he known from the beginning it would come to this eventually? There was no clean way out of a bargain with a devil.
He will do it—but he isn’t fool enough to think it won’t hurt.
“Will you do me a favor?” he murmurs after Daliah returns, when she is moving around the room, preparing more diligently for bed than the mess sprawled amidst her sheets plotting one last assassination. “I’ll pay for it.”
“What is it?” she says, hanging her sheer robe up on the hook on the back of the door.
“Leave a light on?”
“Sure, sweetie.”
***
Jedao wakes to sunlight on the back of his eyelids for the first time in so long he really, really can’t even remember. Even if he wanted to. It’s a gentle lulling experience, like the kiss of a lover to draw you back to wakefulness.
Less lulling is the waiting message on his augment telling him that Cheris is coming to pick him up if he isn’t back at port by eleven. He checks the time. After ten. Well. That would explain why he has to piss so badly.
He sighs and stretches (Another pleasure he finds himself enjoying each time he gets to employ it, the flex and bunch of his muscles, the roll of his joints. He has been all but begging dueling partners off the crew, but so far only Cheris has taken him up on it, and more to humor him and possibly wear him out than anything else, he thinks.) Lain out along his back is Daliah, who is with one hand scrolling on a tablet, and with the other, playing with his hair.
“Welcome back to the land of the living, hon,” she says. “No breakfast service here.” As if on cue, his stomach growls.
“Where are my—?” He looks around for his clothes as he sits up, and without looking up, Daliah gestures wordlessly to a neat pile on the bench at the end of the bed. “Oh. Thank you,” he says, surprised and unexpectedly touched. Certainly Kujen never collected his things for him. He was lucky if Kujen didn’t hide his things to watch Jedao have to hunt around for them.
Daliah keeps scrolling as Jedao gets dressed, raking his hands through his hair to coax it back into some semblance of order. He resists the urge to examine himself in the mirror, which he has been doing too often lately, as if trying to confirm that yes, everything is where he left it.
“You going to be around here later?” Daliah asks, setting the tablet aside and sitting up, legs folded.
“Too bad.” She hesitates and he waits to see what else she might have to say. She gets up from the bed and comes over to smooth his hair out, nails scraping over his scalp, fingertips grazing his ears. “There’s always a sunnier day around the corner,” she says at last. “My mother used to say that.”
“My mother used to say ‘Stop chasing the geese!’”
Daliah laughs quietly. “You, a rambunctious one? I guess I can see it. Asking too many questions too, I bet!”
“Oh yes, always,” he agrees.
“I’ll walk you to the door,” she offers, and this, again, even if it is only a show, touches him. No one else will even fake politesse for him, except out of fear that he’ll shoot them through the forehead if he sees them look at him wrong. Which he understands, but—the experience grows tiresome all the same. At least attached to an anchor they were inclined to show the anchor whatever respect that person was due.
“You’re really not staying any longer?” Daliah asks as they reach the landing. “One more night?”
“No, unfortunately not,” he says.
“Well, I’ll keep an eye out for you anyway.”
There is a sharp clearing of a throat, and Jedao realizes that not only has he failed to beat Cheris to the front door, she’s dragged Brezan along for this jaunty field trip. It wouldn’t have been his choice.
“Well this isn’t fair at all,” says a new voice, a delicate-faced man leaning against the formerly unoccupied front desk. Not the other person from the porch the night before. “I didn’t get a try with him at all.”
“You were busy,” Daliah answers with a shrug. Perhaps for the best, as Jedao suspects he would have tried to have them both and been even more embarrassed than he was. He wonders, briefly, if Daliah has already conveyed some information to this manform that prompted the remark. He wonders what it would have been like to have them both and risks being caught up in that train of thought before being rescued. “Kiss for good luck?” Daliah says to Jedao.
He gives a slight shrug of acquiescence, as if he is indulging her, but when he turns his cheek to her instead of his lips, she understands. Her lips are warm against his face, as is the quiet surge of relief he feels for each instance she has deferred to his signals about touching.
“Take care of yourself, cutie,” she says. “And if you do find yourself here again, do pay me another visit. And remember that sunny day. It’s coming.” Jedao’s expression sobers into something softer, more vulnerable.
“I will,” he says lightly. “Thank you.”
“We need to go,” says Brezan flatly.
“Sounds like you need a turn,” Jedao says.
“We don’t have time for that,” Cheris interrupts before they can get cattier.
“I appreciate the welcoming committee,” says Jedao, which he does not. What he does appreciate is Cheris trusting him to spend one night away from the shipwithout immediately committing another dozen war crimes, something no one else has any faith in (He isn’t sure if explaining that the Hellspin Fortress massacre was intentional and not a sudden onset of insanity would improve that.) He hopes that comes through.
“It was warranted,” she answers with a slight incline of her head that makes him think she got the message.
“One more favor, if I can impose,” says Jedao, a bright smile starting to spread across his face. “Since I’m technically dead, and none of you has added me back onto payroll…can I borrow some money?”
This is an order to all moths from General Shuos Jedao: banner the deuce of gears.
i. Atom Bomb Fluke ii. Anther One Bites the Dust Queen iii. You're Gonna Go Far Kid The Offspring iv. Manipulated Living Michael Andrews v. Handlebars Flobots vi. Cog in the Machine Tonal y Nagual vii. 99 Luftballons Nena viii. Mama My Chemical Romance ix. Dear Dictator Saint Motel x. Gun CHVRCHES xi. Devil's Got You Beat Blues Saraceno xii. Fire and Water Ryan Amon xiii. We Lost Lorien Testard xiv. Requiem, K 626 Lacrymosa Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart xv. Dark Matter Les Friction xvi. Fish in a Gun Barrel NOFX xvii. Dimensional Rachem Macwhirter xviii. Bad Man Blues Saraceno xix. Nightmare Set It Off xx. When the Dying Calls Danzig xxi. I am Shell I am Bone Gazelle Twin xxii. Shatter Me Lindsey Sterling xxiii. Fly Like an Eagle In This Moment xxiv. Knights and Lords Audiomachine xxv. An End Once and for All Clint Mansel & Sam Hulick xxvi. Long Time Traveler The Wailin' Jennies
Photo credits beneath the cut
Background image: NASA image of the day April 8th, 2026
Man clasping hands: Emiliano Vittoriosi on Unsplash
Summary: After the massacre at Hellspin Fortress, Garach Ledana is taken into custody.
AN: In Ninefox Gambit (chapter 8), Jedao tells Cheris he "was told" his mother was murdered while he was still being interrogated over Hellspin. I played around with that timeline a little so that she survives long enough to see him charged.
AO3 | Pillowfort
They make her watch the videos.
Four weeks in custody (she thinks) between crushing dark and blinding light; stale, tepid water; crackers; Rahal; Vidona. They make her watch the videos from the command moth’s internal cameras. Later, they will make her watch what footage was recovered from the documoths’ external cameras. There had been many. (The heptarchate was by then accustomed to getting choice recruitment video material from the footage of Jedao’s fights.)
She remembers the expression of Jedao’s focus, remembers the shooting competitions of his youth and the faint downturn of his brows when he is taking the moment seriously. She remembers this look once or twice when he was naming the animals.
That look is absent in the videos.
In the security footage, he is serene, self-assured, brusque but not rushed: his moments smooth and efficient, well-practiced. No one can argue, with the videos, that he is a wasteful killer. More than once he takes out two of his crew with a single shot, lining them up like clay pigeons in the field while they are still fumbling for their weapons. He barely seems present, as if his mind is half on some other task as he guns down his men.
They make her watch him slaughter the bridge crew as the threshold winnowers chew through the rest of the swam. They make her watch as he calls the other moth commanders and ask for status updates as if he is not aware of what is happening; the static wailing on the other moths reaching her through the audio system of Jedao’s command moth.
She remembers when he transferred out of the Shuos. She always felt she’d never fully understood why, felt that he had intimated to her there was some unspoken reason, but if he wanted something new, a different challenge, that she understood. She remembers his first command in the Kel, which was also his first planetside battle, and the whole thing cattywampus from the start. She remembers the ceremony where he was medaled for succeeding in spite of half his company being blown to smithereens nearly as soon as they landed, in spite of being deaf for most of the mission; he’d attended the honor ceremony with bandages still wrapped around his head from the surgery needed to repair the hearing in both ears from the percussion of enemy munitions. He had been promoted again shortly after, and within a decade, was one of the youngest generals ever appointed.
They make her watch as he calls down to engineering and orders the ranking members to meet him at the door, where they will not have time to run when he arrives. He tells them he needs an in-person report on what is going wrong; they are too far away to have heard the gunfire. His voice is level, an officer calm under fire: what they expect from the renowned and revered Shuos Jedao. They comply. They die in a row.
Jedao has been fascinated with guns since he was a boy (They ask about this, again and again and again.) As a child, he could recite to her an endless parade of statistics and uses and histories of various models, brands, and styles. As an adult, he collected them, but he had favorites; she had gifted him a few herself, usually antique pieces which he received with open delight. He is a good boy about writing thank you notes.
They make her watch his low-level staff running from him down the hall, their plain uniforms evidence of their youth and inexperience, realizing they cannot hope to outshoot their famous quick-draw general. Their feet skid on the smooth floor, moving too quickly to gain purchase. Jedao aligns the shots with practiced care; she has seen him show more emotion on a duck hunt. They do not make it to cover before the crisp, clean pop of Jedao’s favorite sidearm puts each moving target on the floor: one bullet per body, always neat.
She remembers the aftermath of the Battle of Candle Arc, the months of heptarchate officials trying to fête him. Everyone who’d ever spoken to him wanted credit for mentoring him; Heptarch Khiaz called him her protege. One of the involved planets had thrown him a parade; she remembers the photos of him, somewhat abashed, somewhat indulgent, as if he were doing them a favor by allowing the attention (the Kel had demanded it be reframed as a celebration of the entire force, but no one was fooled; Jedao sat front and center for the whole thing). Jedao was the heptarchate ascendant; Shuos Jedao could not lose; it was fated; the high calendar would be spread across every galaxy and their world would never end. She saw the news clips, she read the articles, she heard the talking heads; she remembers the animations, the graphics, the endless analysis as the academics and retired Kel frenzied with glee as they explained Jedao’s victory against obscene odds (censored heavily around anything considered a state secret, which included some of Jedao’s strategies). They called him the greatest tactician the heptarchate had ever seen; they said the Shparoi produced geniuses.
There is only one moment when she makes a noise, a kind of ragged intake of breath of frayed nerves and too many sleepless nights: when Jedao shoots Gized. She recognizes the woman from photos and Jedao’s own descriptions; she remembers hearing about the party where they met; she once spoke with Gized on the phone. She thinks there is a moment Gized’s eyes catch Jedao’s. Blood and brain matter spatter over Gized’s monitor and drip thickly to the floor. Her family will not be able to display the body at her service.
After, they talk to her for hours about it. They make her watch selected clips again and again. They want proof that there were signs of this in his youth. They want to hear that he had orders from someone else. They want to hear about a cultural flaw. They want to hear that their golden child isn’t broken, but corrupted. They want to hear that it can be prevented from ever happening again.
A million is a statistic. It’s one they repeat to her often, over and over. One million people. Nearly a million casualties. Upwards of one million deceased or dying. Full tallies still being run, but in the range of a million souls lost. Did she know? Did she know? Did she know?
She had never seen threshold winnowers in use before, but they are branded against the backs of her eyelids now. They show her the weapons firing again and again and again; they show her the mutilated shells what had, she assumed, once been people; they show her the radiation-blasted buildings and bodies which constituted the detritus of Hellspin Fortress, the Lanterners’ last refuge; they make her listen to Kel academics explain the function and use and impact of the winnowers. They ask her a million questions about them, as if she knew anything about threshold winnowers before this.
In the final videos, Jedao is peaceful. He wanders around the blood-drenched halls of his moth, picking up bullet shells and arranging them into vaguely floral patterns. If there is some rhyme to when he stops one and starts another, she can’t identify it. His fingers, his gloves, are soaked in red. The Kel knock him out with gas, but they don’t need to—he doesn’t resist them when they board.
A million dead; the threshold winnowers; the systematic execution of the command moth’s crew.
Ledana cannot give them what they want.
All she can do is watch.
(More questions—how old was Jedao when he started walking? Talking? Were there any developmental delays that worried her? Did she ever hit him? How can she not remember if she might have hit him once or twice in his life? Did she hit him with a closed fist or an open hand? Did she hit him with an object? Did she put her hands around his neck and restrict his breathing? Did she buy him guns? Why did she buy a child a gun? Did she ever touch him sexually? Is it possible she doesn’t remember doing it? Earlier she said she wasn’t sure if she hit him—is it possible she’s not sure of this either? Did his father touch him? Did his siblings? Did he touch them? Was she ever afraid to be alone in the house with him? How did he treat the animals? Did she ever see him hit an animal not for disciplinary purposes? Did he ever wound an animal with an object, like a knife or a rock? Did he help her butcher the animals? Did he enjoy it? Was she ever afraid to be alone in the house with him? Did he ever hit her? What was he like when he was angry? What sort of things made him angry? How did she discipline him? Was she ever afraid to be alone in the house with him?)
Later, still in custody, they make her watch the livestream.
Jedao is not permitted to walk to the chair on his own; four Kel, laughably outweighing him—Jedao was never very big, not even as big as his brother—wrestle him in from the door. He does not fight them. He moves calmly, but stiffly, except for moments when the Kel push or pull too hard and make him lose his footing in his ill-fitting prison slippers. Ledana thinks of her own last few weeks and wonders how many bruises and lacerations are hidden by Jedao’s sagging prison uniform.
There is an announcement, which begins with a lot of empty prattle about the proceedings and the heptarchate and the nature of the crimes of the accused before they get to proclaiming this event “the execution of General Shuos Jedao” because even now, with the blade of the heptarchate against his throat, they cannot deny the glory of him, cannot strip away the record in his title.
She thinks: he would have been a heptarch.
There are no observers this time, but there are a great many cameras. The angle changes frequently, permitting her a three-dimensional view of her son’s execution. His expression is empty; a blank page; even Ledana can read nothing in it. And she looks—she looks, wanting what the heptarchs want—wanting some evidence of Jedao’s madness.
Is there something there that wasn’t there before, she wonders? Is that a nervous flickering in his eyes, or does she imagine it? Is there a twitch in his hands she’d never seen before? Every shift in his seat puts her back on pins and needles, analyzing.
He was never able to visit very often; she had known she was losing him the moment he departed for Shuos Academy. But he had scored too well on the exams to even consider trying to coax him to stay home, and she had never wished to clip her chicks’ wings. She was proud, and he preened in the light of her pride, and that pride will now haunt her final thoughts. He always came to the house first before visiting anyone else, later bearing gifts, and kissed his mother on the head, and fed the animals. He joked about retiring back to the farm when he was done being the knife in the dark of the heptarchate but—had he stopped making those remarks after joining the Kel? Now she couldn’t remember. Maybe he hadn’t. Did it mean something if he had? Did it mean something if he hadn’t?
When the Vidona approaches with the syringe, Jedao obligingly tilts his head to the side, to give her a cleaner shot of his neck. They have shaved his head and face since the court martial and she can tell he has not been eating. It makes his eyes stand out more prominently in his gaunt face.
She used to send him food. He wasn’t much of a cook and she wanted to help—but then again, she wasn’t much of a cook either. Maybe he had never eaten any of it.
“I’m sorry,” he says when the Vidona has withdrawn the syringe. His voice comes out shaky, but she doesn’t know if it is from the drugs or the circumstances. There is a searching look in his eyes, as if seeking someone who might listen to him. “I’m—” They are panicking. Normally, the executed are permitted last words. Jedao, apparently, was not meant to get that (there had been a lengthy segment of the court martial dedicated to interrogating whether Jedao had charismatically suborned any of his men into his plot; the ultimate conclusion had been there was no plot—just the wrong man snapping at the wrong moment). One of the Kel strikes him hard in the temple with the barrel of their gun. Ledana flinches. She can’t remember the last time she slept. They notice.
“Quiet, traitor!”
This was not how they wanted it, she can tell from the posture of the others in the room, but it is how it is. He is silent.
Ledana’s eyes are fixed on his, as if through the void, somehow, Jedao might know his mother is watching. Somewhere else in the holding facility, in this one or another, she is sure Koiresh is also watching this. Perhaps he will be spared by how little he was a part of Jedao’s life—she can think of only twice they met—perhaps Jedao’s crimes are too great to permit such a mercy.
It doesn’t take long. Less than two minutes, by the timer in the bottom of the screen, before he slumps in the chair’s restraints, head lolling to the side, a lone corpse surrounded by armed Kel; the hero of the heptarchate extinguished like an old swine for dinner. They hate him in direct proportion to how much they had adored him, relied on him, lauded him; for in his actions, he has proven the entire empire full of fools—fools who trusted him. A million dead; the threshold winnowers; the systematic execution of the command moth’s crew.
Something is snipped in Ledana’s chest then; some connection she had not even been aware of severed; she betrays herself with another sound, an involuntary noise of pain, and the tears that seem to instantly appear in her eyes; and for this, she earns another five days of interrogation, as it is evidence that she might mourn her traitor child and therefore be complicit in his horrors. Even so, she cannot stop herself—she had expected to be able to stop herself, but she is so tired—from asking—from begging, until she is screaming at the interrogators—to see his body. This, she is told, is impossible. It has already been disposed of.
“Help us, tell us what you know, and you will find leniency,” the Rahal tell her in between twisting her mind backward over itself until she is incoherent with the violative pain of it. Still, she can offer nothing: nothing she offers of Jedao’s childhood—and she does offer, in the end—pleases them; nothing she offers of his most recent visits or calls—and she does offer, in the end—satisfies them; nothing she explains of their family history, of their cultural customs, of the nature of the Shparoi, of the nature of her relationship with Koiresh and of the fathers of Jedao’s siblings, of Jedao’s friends and siblings, of her own history, of their family’s life philosophies—none of it, no matter in how much repetitive, agonizing detail, gives them what they want: the key to what broke Jedao’s mind.
The most surprisingly thing of all is that when they’ve finally reassured themselves she can offer them nothing of real use, they let her go. The less surprising thing is that they do not make a secret of it.
Least surprising, in the end, someone else does their job for them: Garach Ledana is murdered via a dozen stab wounds to the back on her way from the market less than two weeks after her release from custody. No one is ever charged with the crime.
I do think Jedao's mom sending him a pot of goose fat with a cheery note that it was rendered from the so-many-times-great-grandgosling of his childhood pet goose probably explains a lot about Jedao's sense of humor
Jedao my beloved @a-green-onion - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
