Princess of the Void 6.18 - Who to Belong to

“I don’t know what any of these things are, but the photos are mouthwatering.” Dylan rolls the stylus between his knuckles as he surveys the menu. “Man. I have trouble deciding when the food isn’t from a different solar system.”

Xamika’s tail twitches. He’s surely not doing this on purpose—he probably doesn’t know that if he were a Taiikari man, this would be hardcore flirting. “Give—” She bites the command back. This is a human, remember. “Will you let me see?”

He hands the cardstock menu and its holepunch stylus over.

She scans down the page. “Oh, they have meshaq. You’ll like this.” She pokes the perforated hole out of the page. She’s seen how much Dylan enjoys the lobster rolls they’ve been serving—well, they’re calling it lobster. And maybe the tula-glazed knockfish. She still has trouble with it, but Dylan has a sweet tooth, and she’s due to try it again. Ooh, and there’s—

“Are you ordering for me?”

She looks up from the page at her date’s bemused expression. “Oh, uh. Yes. For us both. Pardon me. May I?”

“Sure.” He leans his towering frame over her to look at the menu and Gods of the Qena-Qel, the size of him. She could hide her entire body in the shadow of his chest and nobody in the world would see her. “What’d you just put in for? That steak-looking thing?”

“This is what I’m having, but I’ll share. Braised thiaqvik. An Eqtoran protein, in a chewy wrap thing from the Taiikari. It’s sort of a fusion thing. And it is sort of like cow, I’m pretty sure.”

“Have you ever had steak?”

“Not the genuine stuff, but big, red, and hearty is universal.” She returns to the printout. “And these, definitely. And we’ll split these shazaktai. You’ll love them, if they do it right and twice-fry them.”

“Will they? We’re a long way from, uh… whatever your planet’s name is.”

“Taiikar.” Xamika looks past Dylan’s broad shoulders to an Eqtoran man in a slick, sleeveless tunic. “Excuse me,” she calls, in Eqtorish. “Sibling.”

Dylan blanches. “Oh—you don’t need to ask.”

“It’s fine. I owe you an answer.” Back to the guttural burr of Eqtorish. “Do you twice-fry your shazaktai, sibling?”

The Eqtoran approaches the table with a smoothness that belies his heft. “Yes, sibling. We’re quite proud of them. We have a Taiikari in the kitchen.”

“Lquni’s hearth warm you, sibling.” Xamika passes him the punched-out menu. “We’ll order some for certain.”

The Eqtoran gives a bow-saw smile. “What is your lenqiqi here, sibling? He’s so pink.”

That’s the first time Xamika’s heard lenqiqi—must be local dialect—but the context is clear enough. “He’s called a Maekyonite. His first time off his world. His name is Dylan.”

Dylan perks up. “It’s a pleasure,” he says, in English.

The server forms Eqt’s Eye with his thumb and forefinger. “Izzaplesher to you as well, sibling,” he replies. “Yours is a wet-sounding language.”

Xamika suppresses a laugh. It is wet-sounding.

“If he is new to the deep sky, I’ll bring him a tankard of ice ale on the house.” The Eqtoran winks. “Loosen him right up for you.”

“Oh—you needn’t, sibling,” Xamika says, but he’s already ambling away. “Well,” she says, in English. “You’re getting a beer, apparently.”

“I’ll grin and bear it, Lieutenant,” he says. “Lieutenant. I keep forgetting I’m on a date with a lady in uniform.”

“I’m not in uniform at the moment.” She indicates the bodycon dress she squeezed herself into, and is gratified by the way it draws Dylan’s eye across her silhouette. “How about you? You’re in logistics on Earth, right?”

“Yep,” he says. “I wanted to work in games, originally.”

“Games like sims? Like Halo?”

His blue eyes brighten. “You know Halo?”

“I love Halo.” Her tail wags. “There was this package of culturally relevant media we were given. And I had to put in a request for a tenday extension because I got to Halo and got stuck on it and had to finish.”

“You’re describing half my middle school essays to a T.”

“And look at you now, Dylan. Having dinner with a grunt.”

He laughs. “Don’t plasma grenade me.”

“You didn’t work on it, did you? Halo?”

“No. I ended up in a company that made them—not Halo, but we had some hits. I had a few months of QA work that was supposed to turn into something more, and then there were layoffs. And I got a job somewhere else in the company just, like, sourcing parts and getting game discs printed. And it was really boring, but a bunch of my friends who worked elsewhere in the industry really hated it or got fired after every project, so I figured, oh well, and stuck where I was. The money was okay. Thank you, sir.” This he directs to the Eqtoran, who’s bringing a tray laden with glistening, garnished delights. “Oh, man. This looks amazing.”

His eagerness puts a pleased rhythm in her tail. “Dig in, Dylan Thorogood. Whatever catches your eye.”

They’re quiet then for a few minutes as Dylan samples the alien cornucopia prepared for him. Xamika only nibbles—her appetite has ranged further afield than food can satisfy.

“I’ve wondered now and then what I’ll do when the Taiikari take over,” Dylan says. “Do I crack this open, or—”

“And then spread it on the bread here, yes.” Xamika allows herself a private moment of smugness for guessing he’d go for the meshaq.

Dylan’s huge fingers crack the meshaq open to reveal its creamy flesh. “Do you guys have a games industry?” he asks, blissfully ignorant of how hard Xamika is trying not to drool over what just happened.

He obeyed just like that. No hesitation. Those massive hands, doing exactly what you told them to.

“Um…” She refocuses on the question. Well, surely the Empire would allow something like Halo. With a few modifications, of course. “Yes. We do.”

“What was that um?”

Xamika is saved from having to go into detail about the Empire’s digital anti-sumptuary laws by the Eqtoran server returning with a frost-rimed tankard the size of her head. “Thank you.” Dylan hefts the tankard down to the table. Its ice-cold amber is the same color as an Eqtoran eye. “Holy shit.”

“Careful,” Xamika says. “It’s very strong.”

“How strong?” He picks up the glass by its body, then shakes the cold from his fingers and takes the handle instead. “Do you do alcohol by volume?”

“We do,” she says. “And that’s six percent.”

“Six percent. Wow.” Dylan sips the beer. “Six is strong, huh?”

“Isn’t it?”

“Where I come from, we call six percent crushable,” he says. “Sorry to break it to you, LT, but I think Taiikari might be lightweights.”

He takes a deeper gulp. She stares. “I think Earthlings might be lushes.”

“So, Taiikar.” He wipes his lip. “Is that where you’re from?”

“Oh, no. That’s all the way in the core.”

“Have you been?”

“Never. I wouldn’t set foot there.” She doesn’t hesitate for a moment with her answer. Pride in the place of one’s birth is only pride’s simulacrum, but she’s a Black Pike sector girl, and she’d never want to live anywhere else. “I was born on a planet called Tamion, to the Zwinai clan. So my full name is Xamika phar Zwinai nai Qena-Qel.”

“Xamika phar Zwinai nai Qena-Qel,” he repeats, as well as he can—which is a lot better than it used to be. “That’s a mouthful.”

“Humans have middle names too, right?”

“Yeah. I’m Dylan Anthony Thorogood. Dy-lan An-tho-nee…” He counts on his fingers. “I guess syllable-wise we’re not so far off, actually. Help me with this beer.”

She finishes her water and holds her glass out.

“What’s Tamion like?” he asks, as with surgical concentration, he pours from his sizable tankard into her itty-bitty tumbler.

“Most of it is volcanoes and fire,” she says. “But there’s a patch of land about the size of Texas on its north pole that’s surpassingly lovely in my memories. I haven’t spent much time there. When I was around… eight years old, if I’m doing the math right, I was sent to a world called Aodok to enroll in the military academy there.”

“Eight? So early?”

“My clan are mostly fabricant workers,” Xamika says. “They’d called in a few favors and gotten me placed into a very well-connected pod—sort of like an Earthling classroom. But I had something of a chip on my shoulder when it came to the pod’s indus, which is a Taiikari word for leader. There was an incident.”

“Like an argument?”

“She called me a minzith’liak, and I broke her nose.” Xamika cringes at the memory. “Please don’t ask me what minzith’liak means.”

“It means something worth getting punched in the nose for,” he says. “Good enough for me.”

“It’s a long, embarrassing story. It wasn’t worth the trouble it caused. I couldn’t stay in the pod, and my clan couldn’t find a satisfying replacement. Not one I could score into or we could pay for, anyway. So off I went.”

His brows knit. “Jeez, Xam. I’m sorry.”

Again with the sorry. Her ear twitches. She knows that word means something different to Dylan Thorogood—she’s already wondering how she might prudently remove it from his vocabulary. “Why’s that?”

“Are you not… do you still talk to them?”

“Sure,” she said. “They made the best of a difficult situation. And I love the Navy. I love how useful I feel in it. And being on a voidship is just fantastic.”

“And you don’t blame them?”

“Well, how can you know what else there would have been, really? I was just eight, after all. And now I’m here, on an ice planet, enjoying this flagrantly alcoholic beer, talking to a handsome alien. This is exactly what the advertisements all say you’ll end up doing. My parents realized where I belonged, and put me there. I’m grateful to them.”

“I sort of undersold it before,” Dylan says. “When I got laid off, when I got that choice taken away from me... I mean I was pissed. I felt like I was being wasted. Your clan. What if they’d chosen wrong? What if—this is getting too deep for a first date.”

“I don’t mind,” she says. “I enjoy talking to you about these things. You’re… more open than I thought you would be.”

“When in Rome, right?”

She nods, though she’s not sure what that means.

“It feels as if you’re foreclosing on everything else, I guess,” he says. “It decided the rest of your life. What if they’d been undeserving? What if they’d picked wrong?”

She hums as she tries to give this the consideration it’s due. “That’s fair. But all those people who did all those layoffs, and gated you from what you wanted to do, and made your friends’ lives miserable. Did you think the people who made those calls deserved to?”

“Not at all,” he says.

“I don’t either,” she says. “You have real passions, and they ignored them. You deserve someone who knows how to use you.”

She doesn’t realize quite what she said until his face turns the prettiest shade of rose-petal pink.

She retreats, tossing out a nervous titter like a smoke bomb in her wake. “That came out as kind of charged, didn’t it?”

He chuckles. “Kind of.”

“It’s a second language.”

“Right. I forget sometimes, with how well you speak it.”

She dares a sip from the beer glass he’s filled for her and tries not to pull a face. “Did you feel like you’d made a mistake? With the path you chose?”

“Oh, yeah,” he says. “I was like, mom was right. I should have been a shrink.”

“This was one of the psychological differentiators they told us about between humans and Taiikari. The idea of all these doors in front of you, and you have to choose one, you yourself, and the rest slam shut. That’s terrifying to me. I think I’d freeze up. I don’t trust myself enough to make that choice.”

“That’s a human fear, too,” he says. “I guess you try not to think of it that way.”

“If you’re guided to one, and told: this is the perfect door for you. Would you take it?”

“Depends on who’s telling me.”

She fixes him with her crimson stare. “What if it was someone who you trusted?”

“I don’t know if there’s anyone I trust that hard, Xam. I—there’s a lot of promises people make when they’re looking for power over you. And I’ve hardly ever seen those promises kept.”

“Well, there you go,” she says. “That’s a Taiikari fear, too. You’re afraid to love someone enough to give yourself away to them, because what if they take what you’re giving too lightly?”

“I don’t know if I’d call it love. It’s politics.”

She shakes her head. “That’s not how it should be. The people who rule you should love you.”

He chews this over a while, along with a bite of shazaktai, which crunches just as it ought to. “They should, shouldn’t they?” he finally says. “But how do you know?”

“Well, what I’d say is we have the hierarchy for it,” she says. “So we always know who’s in charge, and who we can trust. But you doubt that.”

A blonde brow raises. “I think I have good reason to.”

“I think so, too,” she says. “I think I got very lucky, to be given to a Princess like Sykora nai Kei’na Terokai. But I guess a lot of Taiikari think that way about whoever they serve, so…” She picks at the edges of her salad thing. “Maybe we are just subservient. But it’s easier when it’s a guy and a girl.”

“What’s easier?”

“Knowing who’s right. Who to belong to.” She points at her eye. “That’s what the compulsion does. This is all secondhand, of course, because it’s never happened to me.”

“Right.”

“But it carries the… hmm. There’s a word for it in Taiikari. The kzai. I guess the essence of the command. Sort of an emotional imprint. Something you can’t lie about. So there’s this vulnerability—well, the man is far more vulnerable, of course. But the first compulsion is a scary moment for the woman, too. He’ll feel the way that you want him. He’ll know your intent. If you’re not ready to take responsibility for him, to… cherish him, it’s very, very hard to hide it. Which is fine, if it’s just a hookup. A compulsion can feel good even if it isn’t kzai. But when a guy’s looking for something real, that’s how he decides.”

“That’s what you were talking about, isn’t it? The anxiety.”

“Yes. What a Taiikari woman asks a man to give her… it’s not just his body. It’s everything. It’s… kind of ownership. It used to literally be ownership.”

“There have to be relationships where it’s equals,” he says.

“There are,” she says. “But it’s an equality she must offer. If a man can’t feel the kzai… how would he know? How could he trust a daughter of Taiikar enough to give himself to her? Ah, konzaf’kai.” She exhales. “I can’t keep saying him.”

He affects a gormless shock. “What, you’re talking about me?”

“Of course I am, zmek.”

“Takes a zmek to know a zmek.”

“There’s… the Taiikari word is xiavinea, and the closest approximation is duelist. It’s ladies who prefer uncompellable company. The compellability is how we do, uh…”

“Gender.”

“Yes.”

“So I’m a girl.”

“To some of us, you would be,” she admits.

“So… if there’s a word for it, that means it’s not exactly… like it’s not everybody,” he says. “Compulsion isn’t a requirement.”

“Not everybody, no.” She sighs and prepares to vent whatever lovely little thing they’re growing into the void. “But I… I’m not a duelist, Dylan.”

He frowns. “What does that mean?”

“It was so wonderful to go on a date with you,” she says. “And I’m so glad to have done it, but… I think one thing I need to make clear on this date, and it’s kind of me being blunt, but we’re two aliens, so please don’t think less of me.”

He shakes his head. “Promise I won’t.”

“When I think of the kind of guy I want… it’s someone I can take care of. Who wants me to take care of him.”

There’s tension in his shoulders. “Who wants to be owned.”

“Not exactly. But… closer to it than a human man might be used to. I would ask you to give more than is customary in modern Earthling relationships, as I understand them.”

He scoots forward in her seat. There’s a careful fascination on his face. “Give what?”

“Your obedience, Dylan,” she softly says. “I’d decide what we do, where we go. And with every decision, I would try to make you as happy as I possibly could. I would owe you this. But you would belong to me, yes. That’s how most Taiikari do it, and how we’re raised to, and I wish sometimes I was different, that I wanted different things. But I’m not. And I don’t.”

Dylan’s lips are pressed tightly together in thought. An ache lodges in Xamika’s triple-time heart. This was necessary, she reminds herself. It was lovely to imagine, but she’s due to get real.

“And I can’t compel you. I can’t give you what I owe you in exchange. That warm, wonderful promise I’m supposed to make. I can’t prove to you I’m ready to take responsibility for you. So… this has all been lovely, but…” God, his eyes. She’s flagging under that sapphire stare. “If you could feel it, I… I don’t know that you’d want it. But maybe you’d understand.”

“Xamika nai Qena-Qel.” Dylan’s voice matches her boudoir softness. “When did I say I didn’t want it?”

Her brain locks up and stops issuing its proper commands. It’s only with conscious effort she forces breath through her lungs.

“That whole compelling promise thing does sound like it would be nice and reassuring,” Dylan says, at conversation volume again. “But besides showing up uninvited on my kitchen table and denting my Toyota—”

She flinches. “I feel awful about that. I thought all I’d have to do was just compel you calm and then I’d have time to explain everything.”

“Well, besides that snafu—okay, and the alien abduction, which sounds way worse when I say it aloud—it’s been…” He cracks a meshaq shell and spoons the creamy flesh onto his sha root. “Well, it’s been fun. Fun and surprising and I’m seeing things I’d never have dreamt I’d see, and eating, uh…” He lifts the sha from the plate and takes a bite. “Dude. That is not how I expected it’d taste.”

“Better or worse?”

“Better. It’s good. It’s a lot more flavorful than the Earth thing my mind was comparing it to. Kinda like a beet.”

“What were you comparing it to?”

“A potato. You have got to try a french fry next time.”

“Next time?”

“Or whichever time,” he says. “Whenever we get to Earth. I guess that’s probably not the second date.”

She tries to keep her voice from going another octave up. “You want a second date?”

“Why not? It sounds like fun. A sexy space goblin soft-domming me? I mean it’s maybe not the whole planet’s thing, but it’s certainly got me curious. Besides. if you were lying about your intentions I could probably pick you up and toss you.”

She laughs in scandalized relief. “Could not.”

“It’s sort of a relief to find out we’re not alone and the aliens are sexy,” he says. “And there’s still this weird Imperial cloud over everything, but you, yourself, you’ve been nothing but kind to me. The arrangement you’re talking about—it’s something we do, too. I mean, not me, but I met a guy at a metal convention once. I don’t need to have the compulsion to tell me you mean well. Or to do what you say. I just need… communication, I guess. And the chance to say yes to it.”

His jaw looks so strong when he smiles.

“There’s a lot of yeses I’d say, you know? If it was someone like you asking.”

Dylan Thorogood doing anything she asks him to. Dylan Thorogood’s vast, gorgeous strength under her command. Dylan Thorogood putting himself in her care. She wants to say something—what, she’s not sure—but again she is having trouble catching her breath.

His smile grows. “Your horns come out when you’re flustered, don’t they?”

Her scalp tingles; her hair tickles her crowning horns. “That’s—that isn’t something to bring up to Taiikari ladies.”

“I have a lot to learn about Taiikari ladies, I guess,” he says.

“I uh—” Her food is getting cold. She barely notices. “I have a lot to teach.”

“Cultural immersion, right?”

She laughs out a few of the butterflies in her heart. “Cultural immersion.”

“What if tomorrow…” The way he’s fidgeting, he must feel the same jittery courage she does. “What if we tried it out?”

“Tried it out?”

“You can’t compel me,” he says. “But whatever you told me, I’d do. And we’d see what it would be like.”

“Oh.” Under the table her knees rub together. “Okay.”

“Okay,” he says, softly. “What am I doing tomorrow?”

Her vision sharpens as the blood warms her face. A sweet ache builds in her stomach and behind her eyes. She wants to compel him so fucking badly that she needs to blink to force the urge down. But even with his immunity, it doesn’t feel right. Not yet. She needs to earn him.

“Tomorrow you’re getting up at 0940,” she says.

“That’s later than my alarm.”

“I’ll show you how to turn it off,” she says. “I’ll come wake you. You’ve been groggy in the mornings. You’re used to sleeping in, I think.”

“Guilty.”

“And you don’t need to worry about breakfast hours with the humans, because you’ll have breakfast with me, and a few of my friends. I’ll introduce you. They’ll like you. They’ll try to impress you with how much English they can speak, probably.”

“Are they as good as you?”

“No,” she says. “But they try.”

“And after breakfast?”

“We’ll spend the day together,” she says. “I’ll show you more of the Qena-Qel. All my favorite spots on the ship. We’ll go to the hydropons and the blue squadron hangar where my friend Limva will let us check out a shuttle for a while, and I’ll take you flying. Then we’ll watch the sweep from the terraces above the armory range.”

He leans his cheek on his fist. “Not bad so far.”

“In the evening we’ll take food back to my cabin and we’ll play Halo, because I have been throwing myself at The Library on Legendary for days now and I desperately need a human to help me through it. And then we’ll say good night, and you’ll go back to your cabin. And if, when you’re falling asleep, you decide you’ve had a lovely day, and I’ve been good to you, we’ll do it again the next day.”

His hand slides past his plate and encroaches across the halfway point of the table. “And the next day?”

Her tail creeps onto the carved wood and meets his fingertips. “And the next day.”

“How long would you be willing to do this?”

“However long you would let me.”

“And you’d be patient? While I decided?”

“For you,” she says. “Yes.”

“I’d want veto power,” he says. “A lever to pull if there was something I really didn’t want to do. Like a safe word.”

“We could do that.”

“I’d want rules that were laid out and we both stuck to. Maybe something to sign, like that chick from Fifty Shades. Did they give you that one?”

“I can’t say they did.”

“Maybe that’s for the best,” he says. “That metalhead guy I mentioned would certainly say so.”

“What’s a metalhead?”

“Remind me to play you some Iron Maiden.”

Iron is indeed a kind of metal, and a maiden is an old-timey word for a virgin. She nods and files this away before the intrigue overwhelms this gossamer moment they’re sharing.

“How about this?” Dylan says. “Here’s my challenge to you, Xamika phar Zwinai nai Qena-Qel.”

The way he says her name—the alien twang to it—sends honey warmth drizzling across her brain.

“Seven perfect days.” He holds up seven fingers. “If you can give me that—if I wake up every morning eager to do whatever you tell me to—then on day eight, you have your volunteer.”

A lightness in Xamika’s throat like the rising of a sun. “You’ll…”

“I’ll march up to Janeima,” he says, “and tell her to put that implant in my head.” He drops all fingers but two. “But I have two conditions. Firstly: I can call it off at any time before then, no questions asked, and the experiment is over.”

“Done.”

“And when I can learn English again, you’re the one who teaches me.”

“I’m—” Her horns are most of the way out now. She casts about for her duty cap. “I’m not qualified, exactly.”

“Sure you are,” he says. “Your English is flawless.”

“I don’t know what happens if you become a citizen. I—I might be reassigned, or—”

“I know this guy Grant Hyde who could maybe pull some strings,” he says. “Or I could order you, maybe. Lord-style. And I could pay you. To teach me English eventually, but also how the hell being a nobleman works. I could really use someone in the Royal House of Thorogood, or whatever it is, who knows what to do with it.”

Finally she finds her cap and covers her desperately pointy horns. “I—um—I really don’t know. I’d be willing if the Navy was, I just—”

But something in her thrills to it. To the idea of…

Choosing a different door. Choosing something for yourself.

“Okay,” he says. “Not a condition. But think about it for me, all right?”

Thinking is harmless. She nods.

“And anyway, it doesn’t matter until you’ve given me seven days.” He shrugs. “If you think you’re up for it.”

Xamika is lighter-than-air, and she feels vaguely terrified, and she feels very brave. “You’re on.”

“All right, then.” He puts a hand out.

She wipes her palm on her skirt before she takes it and shakes it.

“Starting tomorrow,” he says, and his hand is so huge it could fold hers in completely, but his touch is so infinitely gentle. “When 9:40 in the morning comes around, I’m yours.”