“That was not a fight.” Jahir rose to pluck up the pillow and begin changing the sheets. “It was an exercise. She was not wedded to either side of the argument—what engaged her was the process of examination.”
“And you like that too.”
“It was a discussion that harmed no one,” Jahir said. “And there is an exhilaration inherent in the exploration of ideas. Isn’t there?”
Vasiht’h smiled. “I never really thought of it. I hate debate… I always feel like I lose.”
“Your intelligence works differently.” The Eldritch unfolded the fresh set and handed the sheet down to him. “You are patient and deep and intuitive.”
Flushing, Vasiht’h said, “And practical, I hope.”
“And practical.” The mindline softened. “I meant what I said. I mean what I say now. You are a good partner, arii.”
Vasiht’h’s ears splayed. “I don’t feel old enough to be wise.”
“Neither of us is,” Jahir said. “That doesn’t mean we are not endowed, occasionally, with flashes of insight. A gift, if you prefer.”
“I could believe that.” Vasiht’h looked toward the door and shook his head. “Poor Lennea. Ametia’s going to descend on her like a storm.”
“A well-meaning one,” Jahir said. “But yes. They are an interesting pair, to have become friends.”
“I can see it,” Vasiht’h said. “Sometimes the stormy people need someone to calm them down.”
“Then they are admirably suited… and I hope whatever comes of this works out for the best.”
“Amen,” Vasiht’h murmured.
Chapter 20
The days slipped away. Vasiht’h tried to hold them the way he sensed his friend did, as precious and ephemeral things to be enjoyed, hour by hour. Some days he managed. On the days he didn’t, he comforted himself that the fact that he could enjoy each day as it came some days meant he wasn’t entirely consumed by his worries. In one of their sessions, Tiber recommended he research other worlds as a way to deprive the future of its louring anxiety, so he tried that and actually had fun looking at different planets and settlements and imagining himself living on them. He still wanted to stay on Veta, but considering a different future made him realize how expansive that future was, and how satisfying it would be to introduce Jahir to new parts of the Alliance, or to experience them for the first time himself.
Tiber was a lot more helpful than he’d thought possible, which made the afternoon the receptionist called to cancel his appointment disappointing. “Can we reschedule you next week?” she asked.
“Sure,” Vasiht’h answered. “Is Allen all right?”
The Seersa paused, ears flicking outward. “Allen’s fine. But Trusty died, so he took this week off.”
“Oh no!” Vasiht’h exclaimed, shocked. “What happened? He seemed fine last time I was there?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “It was very sudden. But Trusty was old for a dog. It was only a matter of time.”
The thought of Tiber without his dog was… well, it was inconceivable. Vasiht’h kept trying to imagine Allen without Trusty lying at his feet or trotting alongside him and failing. He wasn’t an animal person himself, but he felt stricken on Tiber’s behalf.
It was their day off from the office; ordinarily Vasiht’h would have spent it puttering while Jahir wandered the starbase, and then going to find them something to cook for dinner. But he lost track of time, and when the Eldritch came back it was to a dim kitchen and a cold table.
“Arii?” Jahir said at the door. “Did you not want to eat?”
“Oh!” Vasiht’h rubbed his face, grimaced as he looked at the room. “I completely forgot.”
The mindline’s caress felt a little like a probe. “You were not reading... something is troubling you?”
Vasiht’h went to the cupboard to see if he could figure something out without resorting to the genie. “This is going to sound ridiculous but… Tiber’s dog died.”
The dismay in the mindline reassured him a little that he wasn’t crazy; Jahir found the news just as upsetting. “He must be in great distress.”
“He loved that dog,” Vasiht’h agreed. Nothing in the refrigerator suggested anything to him. Maybe they should go out for a late supper. As he studied the selection available, the mindline developed an odd flavor, a sideways tilt that kept building until at last Vasiht’h looked over at his friend. “What?”
“You are… concerned… about Doctor Tiber.”
Realizing how unlikely that was, Vasiht’h flushed. “Well, yes. I… ah… might actually be seeing him now and then. For therapy.”
This pause made Vasiht’h very nervous. Unfairly, because nothing he could sense through the mindline was suggestive of judgment or disapproval. Jahir said finally, “Really?”
“I figured you knew?” Vasiht’h said sheepishly. “I mean, I’m drawing from our account for it, and the transaction’s labeled. Don’t you look at our account?”
Jahir’s pause was accompanied by a tender heat in the mindline, like blushing skin.
“You don’t,” Vasiht’h said, amazed. “Do you.”
“I… have little cause. We are not large spenders.”
“You’re not a large spender!” Vasiht’h exclaimed, still astonished. “But you don’t know the first thing about my spending habits. For all you know, I could be buying everything in sight!”
Jahir was standing close enough to the wall to rest his back on it, and there was something sheepish about the set of his shoulders. “And putting it where?”
“Fine, I could be spending it on something intangible that you can’t see,” Vasiht’h said.
“But… that is not in your character?”
Vasiht’h eyed him. “Arii…”
Jahir said, weakly, “Perhaps we should eat dinner at the café with the scones? I will even eat the mousse.”
The Glaseah choked down an unwilling laugh. “Look, can we just… can you just answer this once, and then we don’t have to talk about it again?”
Jahir hesitated, then said, “Ask…?”
“Are you rich?”
This pause made both of them nervous. Vasiht’h didn’t know what Jahir was thinking, but for his part he found he was scared of the answer either way. So naturally, he got an Eldritch answer.
“Is it enough to say that I feel no need to worry?”
“Only if you know enough about how much it costs to live in the Alliance to say that,” Vasiht’h said. “You said yourself it was different on your world. What do you honestly know about the cost of living here? Do you know?”
Jahir looked away. “I know that I need not worry.” He drew in a breath, deep enough to be seen across the table, and that meant he was very unsettled. “You need not either.”
What could he do? The whole exchange had been so… so Eldritch somehow that he couldn’t help but find it endearing. He had loved Jahir from the start, mysteries and all, and Vasiht’h had backed him into a corner and still he could only be, consummately, who he was. Which also entailed a ‘what he was.’ If Vasiht’h hadn’t been willing to grapple with the what along with the who, he would never have accepted the Goddess’s gift. And the mindline truly was a gift.
Vasiht’h counted his in-breaths, let them out. “So, you really are rich.” When the Eldritch didn’t contradict him, he closed his eyes and nodded. “All right. That helps, actually.”
Incredulity seeping through the mindline, tinted with hope. “It does?”
Sehvi’s quiet good sense; Tiber’s gentle corrections to his perspective. He saw their situation through those lenses and it let him understand that his own problem—needing to feel like an adult at last, able to support himself—was entirely separate from the complications of Jahir’s money. Vasiht’h would have felt the need to prove himself no matter his situation… Jahir’s addition to it was a distraction from the real issue he had to resolve. “It does help. I won’t pretend I’m comfortable with it, because I’m no
t. But knowing for certain… I can set it aside and deal with the important stuff.”
“…which… is?” Jahir asked, tentative.
“That I need to be enough for myself,” Vasiht’h said. “And that has more to do with how I grew up and the people I feel I have to prove myself to.” He folded his arms. “You’re not off the hook, though. I want to be a partner here, not just a kept friend.”
“A kept… friend?”
Of course he didn’t know the original phrase. “A kept man, or woman, is someone a richer person supports financially because they want their company.”
Jahir considered that at length, then said, “Then you could never be a kept… friend. I am not buying your company, Vasiht’h. I could not, any more than you could buy mine. Do you doubt that?”
It embarrassed Vasiht’h that he hadn’t even considered that angle. “I guess when you put it that way….” He smiled wryly. “I’d say I’m making a mess of things, but we’re communicating so it can’t be that bad.”
“Relationships do require communication.” Jahir hesitated. “Are we well now?”
“Yes,” Vasiht’h said. “We’re good. I mean, I’m not miraculously over my need to be successful in my own eyes, by my standards, but I don’t think the fact that I haven’t met those standards is your fault.”
“Good,” Jahir said.
“But we’re still going to the café with the scones,” Vasiht’h said.
Jahir hid his wince so well Vasiht’h might have missed it had he not felt it through the mindline.
“Don’t worry,” Vasiht’h said, amused. “If there’s cream or mousse or double servings of kerinne, I’ll handle them for you.”
Jahir opened the door and stood out of the way. As Vasiht’h passed through it, the Eldritch said, quiet, “Truly? We’re well?”
There was such wistfulness in it that Vasiht’h had to stop and reach for him. He knew touch should be a rare thing, but this moment needed it. Setting his hand on his friend’s arm, he looked up and put every ounce of his conviction into the words, into the mindline. “Arii. I mean it.” Smiling, he said, “Honestly, this is small stuff. You know?”
“Money separates many relationships,” Jahir said, soft.
“It won’t separate ours.” Vasiht’h snorted. “And if I let it, I deserve my misery. Sehvi would pound me into the dirt, too. ‘You left him because he had too much money? Any other stupid reasons you want to turn people away at the door? Too nice? Too smart? Too funny?’”
Jahir dipped his head to hide the smile Vasiht’h could feel like sunshine through their link. “We do laugh.”
“We do,” Vasiht’h said. Thinking of Tiber, he said, “We’re very lucky.”
“Yes.” Jahir shook his hair back and said, resolute, “The scones.”
“If you eat them all, I’ll buy you ice cream.”
That conversation stayed with Vasiht’h long after it happened, like incense clinging to his fur. Something about the mingling of Tiber’s bad news with the chance to tell Jahir that he’d been seeing a therapist, and the final resolution, such as it was, of the uncertainty of their monetary state…
“So you’re good with this?” Sehvi asked, incredulous.
“Yes,” Vasiht’h said. “No. I’m good with it being something I can’t control.”
“You are?” she said, eyes widening further.
He started laughing. “All right, maybe it’s going to take me a while to work through it. But I see what the problem is at least. Knowing that gives you some tools to keep it from overrunning your life.”
“Uh huh.”
“You don’t have to sound so dubious, you know!”
“You have Jahir to be supportive. Or that guy you’re seeing. You need me for some good, solid, practical skepticism.” She grinned, before sobering. “It’s just too easy.”
“It is the least easy thing in the world,” Vasiht’h said with emphasis. “Just knowing the problem and that it’s inside me doesn’t do the work of fixing it. A lot of days I’m fine, but there are days where I’m convinced this is all crazy and I’m crazy and I can’t believe I’m muddling through it. I’m still waiting to grow up, ariishir.”
“Maybe that’s why people have kits,” Sehvi said. “You have to be a grown-up if you’re raising people who actually are children.”
Vasiht’h snorted. “There are plenty of parents who haven’t grown up.”
“Yeah, but we wouldn’t be one of them.”
Hard to argue that, so he didn’t. “Well, I’m not ready for a family. I don’t even have a permanent practice yet!”
“Isn’t your time almost up?”
“A few weeks now,” Vasiht’h said, feeling it like a pressure on his back.
“I bet once that passes and you know, one way or the other, you’ll feel better about everything else,” Sehvi said.
“I bet you’re right.”
Tiber said the same thing in their session. “Problems magnify one another’s effects. That’s why we snap at people about small things so often: we’re grappling with the emotional weight of other issues, and it uses up our self-control.”
Vasiht’h grimaced. He had his head on the table, in his folded arms, and was using the rake to push one of the rocks through the sand garden. “I know. We only have so much self-control a day. But there must be a way to increase that capacity, you know? Otherwise some people wouldn’t have so much more of it.”
“Maybe they’re just born that way,” Tiber said, smiling a little.
Vasiht’h covered his face. “Don’t tell me that.”
“All right. Maybe they’re using up all their power and when they finally snap it’ll be nuclear.”
That startled a laugh out of Vasiht’h. “Goddess, I hope not.” He sighed. “Is it ridiculous to say I wish this would be over, one way or the other, to someone who doesn’t want me to be here doing what I’m doing?”
It was Tiber’s turn to look away then. “I don’t want them to send you away from the starbase, alet.”
Vasiht’h looked up. “You don’t? But if we don’t practice, they’ll tell us we’re not adding anything useful to the community, and we’ll have to go.”
“I know. I can find your work problematic and still hope you’ll be able to stay here, when it means so much to you.”
Which was a lot more nuanced compassion than Vasiht’h had been expecting on the topic. He studied Tiber in the time remaining to them and saw the hollows under his eyes, and felt his heart crimp for the other man. At the close of the hour, Vasiht’h asked, hesitant, “Do you want to talk about it?”
Tiber didn’t need that explained. He glanced at the rug, and maybe he saw the ghost there. Vasiht’h did. “No.”
Vasiht’h nodded and said, quieter, “I’m sorry for your loss. Is there anything we can do…?”
Tiber glanced at him, let that look lengthen. His head-shake was curt. “No.” And a little gentler. “Thanks for asking.”
Chapter 21
“Tell me about Selnor.”
Jahir looked up from his soup and found Helga studying him, spoon loose in her fingers. Beside her, Vasiht’h paused on his way to the bread in the middle of the table.
/Almost six months she’s been coming to dinner and she finally asks now?/ Vasiht’h said.
/Yes,/ Jahir answered, because it could only have been this way. /Exactly./
“I assume it was eventful!” the Hinichi continued, spooning up a potato chunk and slurping the cream out from around it, rather like a gleeful child. Jahir was not at all deceived by her demeanor. Beneath the glib façade he could sense the authority the decades had mantled on her shoulders: she was young, as Eldritch counted time, but responsibility had made her the equal of any elder in his society. And like an Eldritch matriarch, she had decided it was now time to evaluate her successors, and for that she wanted this last piece of information, a piece she’d divined was crucial to her understanding of them as people.
She was right, of
course. Selnor had changed everything for them both.
“It is a story we both should tell,” Jahir said, looking at Vasiht’h.
“I think of it as more about you than me,” Vasiht’h confessed.
“But there would be no story at all without you.”
Vasiht’h’s ears sagged, but his blush through the mindline tasted of gratitude. /You love me./
/Of course I do. Do you doubt?/
/No./ Vasiht’h smiled. /You’re the truest constant in my universe now, along with Her./
Jahir closed his eyes to let that settle into him, like the benison it was. Then he pushed his bowl away.
“Oh, no,” Vasiht’h said. “Don’t tell me you’re going to skip dinner because of this.”
“I can tell the story,” Jahir said. “Or I can eat. And I think I need to tell the story.” He met Helga’s eyes.
The Hinichi answered, “You need to tell the story.”
/One missed meal won’t harm me, arii./
/So long as it doesn’t turn into a pattern…/
/If it does, I ask you to correct me./
Vasiht’h mmmed quietly. “I’ll help. But I’m going to eat.”
Jahir smiled over at him and said to Helga, “Initially I was uncertain that I would be capable of lingering here in the Alliance. Loving…” He paused, gathering his thoughts. “Loving is challenging.”
“Especially if you think everyone’s going to die on you?” Helga guessed.
“We live a long time,” Jahir said quietly. “It makes us uncomfortable with risk.”
“And yet here you are.”
“Yes.” Jahir settled himself with a long breath. /I begin./
/I’m with you./
/I know./
Telling Helga about Heliocentrus was difficult, but not for the reasons Jahir expected. Divulging personal information… he had been conditioned to find that uncomfortable. Gauche, when it wasn’t forbidden entirely by the Veil. He avoided it reflexively, and overriding that impulse required effort. But sharing this episode, this very painful, personal episode of his life, with a woman he still thought of as an acquaintance was easy. What hurt was having to live through it again, even at a remove. The punishing fatigue. The grief. The knowledge that he had limits, and he could smash into them so badly he couldn’t put himself back together without help. All the reasons, he thought, that made him feel new compassion toward those he strove to aid in his practice… in many ways, the root of those reasons grew out of his own experience, failing when he needed so badly to succeed.
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