CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
AIDEN
I settled myself on my bed, two pillows at my back, and checked once again that the door was fully closed. I was being paranoid – I could see perfectly well that it was closed – but the conversation I was about to have would be devastating if Jai accidentally overheard it.
I contemplated the options again, then shook my head and pressed call on the name on my screen. Captain Ezekiel Rhodes. He was the best person I could think of to help me out of my current conundrum.
“Hi Zeke,” I said, when his face popped up on the holographic screen. “Sorry to call you so late. But I desperately need some advice.”
Zeke laughed, and it struck me how good it felt to hear that.
When I’d first met him, he’d been near suicidal.
He’d come a hell of a long way since then.
“After the number of times I’ve called you at some ungodly hour for urgent advice, I think I can cut you some slack just this once.
” He settled himself more comfortably into his chair. “What do you need?”
“You know the new dimari who arrived in that crate? Well, I ended up adopting one of them. He’s a combined combat specialist and erotic companion.
And I’ve been doing a bit of… Wait a second,” I cut myself off.
“Is Dax around?” Dax was Zeke’s dimari, and a most unusual creature at that.
He’d been trained as a domestic servant, but we’d pushed him into a far more complex role, and from all appearances, he seemed to be thriving in it.
“Yeah, he’s right here,” Zeke said, tilting the camera to show Dax sitting on a nearby armchair.
“Right. Well, I… kind of need to talk to you privately,” I said, as politely as I could manage.
“Ah. I see. Give me a minute then…” The camera cut off, along with the sound, and I waited… and then a short time later, the screen came back to life. “I’m in my bedroom with the door shut, and I’ve got my earpiece in,” Zeke told me. “I take it you need to say some things that Dax shouldn’t hear?”
I nodded. “It’s about how none of us are actually the dimari’s intended masters.
” Dax was still blissfully ignorant to that reality, and though there was a distinct likelihood that he would find out one day, dimari tended to find that sort of thing highly traumatic.
So Zeke, like so many of the other dimari owners, was hiding the truth for as long as possible.
“Right. Your new one found out already, did he?” Zeke guessed.
“Not exactly, no. And I’ll apologise in advance. This conversation might push a few buttons for you. I mean, that’s kind of why I picked you to talk to. Since you have experience dealing with PTSD.”
I paused to let that sink in. Zeke had been badly injured in a mission gone wrong, which had also killed a large number of his crew mates. Coming to terms with all of his experiences had taken a long time and a lot of effort.
I watched as he visibly braced himself, then nodded. “Okay. Hit me with it, then… Wait, hang on. Who’s got PTSD?” he interrupted himself.
“Jai. The new dimari. Or, at least, that’s the overall impression I’m getting.”
“How can he have PTSD? He’s only just come out of the box.”
“Because his trainers were a bunch of grade A assholes who screwed him up in every way imaginable.”
“I hate those fucking Eumadian scum,” Zeke muttered. “Okay, okay, what did they do to him?”
I filled him in slowly, everything I’d just learned about Jai’s training, plus his ongoing belligerence and unwillingness to cooperate.
I even included his behaviour in that ill-fated shower on our first day.
I’d had plenty of awkward conversations with dimari owners about their need to have sex with their dimari, so I figured it was only fair to be on the receiving end of that embarrassment for once.
“So the place we get to with all of this,” I concluded, some time later, “and please tell me if this is a ravingly stupid idea. But I’m thinking that maybe the best thing I can do for Jai is to tell him straight out that I’m not his intended master.
Right now, he hates me, because he thinks I’m the cause of all the shit that happened to him, and because he’s just waiting for me to shovel more shit into his life as we go along.
The only way I can think of to convince him that that’s not true is to tell him that I didn’t buy him; I just adopted him when he got stranded here. ”
“Hm.” Zeke gave that a moment or two’s serious thought. “What does Kade think of that?” he asked first, before offering any sort of opinion.
I’d had a conversation with Kade about it before I’d called Zeke, knowing his advice would be invaluable.
“He’s kind of sitting on the fence about it all.
It was incredibly stressful for him to find out that I wasn’t his true master, and that was compounded by the fact that the Eumadians wanted to reclaim him and force him to bond to someone else, and then the whole thing with the Nwandu trying to take over our planet.
So in Kade’s defence, there was a lot going on at the time.
But even so, he’s largely of the opinion that it would be replacing one trauma with a different trauma, rather than just erasing a big chunk of the first one. ”
“Which may be true, but on the other hand, Kade learned to deal with that, and in the long run, he’s come out of it pretty well.
The downside, I suppose, is that Jai already doesn’t trust you, so you’ve got less leeway to be heaping more unexpected news on him.
But the bigger issue in my mind is…” Zeke pressed his lips together and furrowed his brow.
“On the PTSD side of things, there are no magical cures. As I’m sure you well know.
But having that idea constantly hanging over his head, that he could be called up to serve some ungodly assignment at a moment’s notice, would be slow torture.
At least, based on my own experiences, it would.
“If I had the constant threat of being sent back to Ixralia hanging over my head, I’d go insane.
Literally, within a week. Even knowing that I didn’t have to go back there, the idea that other teams could be sent was a nightmare.
I found a little bit of peace when the Alliance Parliament finally declared the Ixralian wormhole off limits, but I didn’t really start getting a handle on my own mental state until the Ranzors declared what a fucking shitshow that place was.
The biggest bad-asses in the galaxy collectively decided that Ixralia was the embodiment of hell. That recognition did a lot for me.
“So there’s a potential benefit there. Sometimes simply having trauma acknowledged as trauma can help to start things healing. And if you do that for Jai, that could potentially go very well.
“But at the same time, I would have a really hard time telling you to disregard Kade’s concerns.
Even after all this time, if I told Dax that I wasn’t his intended master, he’d lose his fucking mind.
Ultimately, we’d probably get through it, because we genuinely love each other, but that’s a whole other level of mind fuck for a dimari.
So you’d have to go real heavy on the ‘I’m really glad you’re here and I love having you as my dimari’ thing, except from the sounds of it, that’s not going to work either, because he currently has no reason to trust you.
So… Shit, I don’t know, Aiden. I mean, I’m just going off your descriptions of him here.
And I know you’re a very observant kind of guy.
That’s why you’re in the job you’re in in the first place.
But it’s a really hard call to make, given how much could go wrong, no matter which way you decide to go. ”
I tried not to be too frustrated with the idea that this conversation was just going in circles. At the end of the day, if there was a simple answer, I’d have found it myself.
But then, as I sat there and pondered the options, another idea occurred to me.
“Hey, Zeke… you say it’s hard to make a decision because you haven’t met Jai and you’re just depending on my descriptions of him.
Which is totally fair. But that makes me wonder…
What if we could arrange for you to meet him in person? ”