But he felt safe, so he answered the tacit question by receiving the gift with open mouth and shared breath.
“I return anon,” Lisinthir murmured, burnishing the words silver. “Make your call, cousin.”
“All right.”
And then he was alone.
He did not rise immediately. He remained where he was, stretched and exposed on the bed, cataloguing his manifold pains and aches. Feeling the patches where dried sweat had stiffened his skin. Smelling the strangeness of the sheets around him, of the scent of his own sleeping mingled with someone else’s. He’d expected to feel either alienated from his body or seated more fully in it, and what he felt instead was some confusing amalgam of the two. He was at home in himself… and aware of things in himself that felt very new, very strange, and very dangerous.
He didn’t want to call Vasiht’h, but he did. He supposed that went hand in hand with the rest of his ambivalence. Shower first. Then the rest.
A picnic with rambunctious younglings was exactly what Vasiht’h had needed. With Sehvi strolling at his side, they’d ambled over the hills in a golden autumn afternoon, and his nephews darted here and there, bringing back treasures, demanding his attention, interrupting their own requests with sudden games of chase. His sister was unperturbed by their behavior, which made it easier to take it all in stride. And really, what reason did they have to rush? He was on vacation, with family, in an idyllic locale.
The lake that spread before them over the second hill was not just the perfect backdrop for a picnic, but obviously a familiar destination as well... as the boys demonstrated by launching themselves into it with confident yells.
“They swim?” he’d asked Sehvi.
“Oh, I threw them in while they were still wet behind the ears from being born,” she’d answered, unloading the picnic basket. “You can’t start too soon with drownproofing them. Particularly boys!”
They dragged him into the lake, too, and if their young blood didn’t notice the chill, his far older joints certainly did. He also found he didn’t notice that until after they were done playing, because he’d been too busy paddling after them to pay attention to anything but their delight. That was how it worked, then, he thought when he hauled his soggy body onto the shore. Or at least, partially. Children diverted you from your own woes. And magnificently too. He found himself wondering if he could prescribe playtime with children as medicine and was struck by the thought that people had probably been doing that without a prescription for time immemorial.
The Goddess thought of everything.
Nevertheless, Vasiht’h was glad of the hot chocolate, the repast, and the long ramble back. With Kovihs not due back until supper he took advantage of the lull to shower and unpack, and it was then that the comm alerted. There was a small emitter in the guest bedroom, so he sat in front of it and accepted the call.
“Arii!” he exclaimed. “I didn’t expect you.” And then he paused, and laughed. “All right, probably not the most tactful thing I’ve said.”
“Given what it implies?” Jahir said, a slight smile curving his mouth.
“Well, yes,” Vasiht’h said, embarrassed. But he really hadn’t expected Jahir to want to mix his sexual holiday with his very much asexual partner. He’d been prepared to hold that distance for the Eldritch’s comfort but he was glad he wouldn’t have to. “But now that I’ve finished applying paw to mouth… I might as well admit to surprise. Are you well?”
“Do I look well?”
Vasiht’h’s eyes narrowed and he folded his arms.
“I ask out of an honest desire to know, arii.”
“That would suggest an answer of its own, wouldn’t it?”
“And does it accord with your perception?”
Vasiht’h leaned back on his haunches. The emitter was showing him Jahir’s upper body—he was probably at a desk—and on the surface his partner looked much the same as always. Dressed in his usual caramel browns and creams, with his hair freshly washed and resting behind his shoulders, in every way as neat as he consistently presented himself. The local chronolog floating in the bottom corner put Starbase Alpha’s time at very early morning, and his partner liked mornings, so seeing him so well put-together so early was no surprise.
But there was something Vasiht’h couldn’t pin down about his partner’s body language, and without the mindline to suggest Jahir’s mental state he couldn’t decide what it was. “I don’t know,” he admitted finally. “You look calmer to me, arii… and shattered.”
Jahir lowered his eyes, then said, “I can read minds—”
Not news, there, he wanted to say.
“—from across the room, arii. And I can force people at that distance to feel my feelings as well.”
Vasiht’h’s brows rose. “Really?”
“Apparently so, yes,” Jahir said, low. “Very much so.”
For a moment, Vasiht’h could think of nothing to say and dearly missed the mindline’s ability to share, because he would have shared his exuberant jumble of awe and joy and astonishment and curiosity. Everything was fighting for the right to use his throat, and it took a while for him to put them in some sort of order. “What a gift…!”
“I… I beg your pardon?”
If he wasn’t mistaken, that had almost been indignation? Which was such an unexpected reaction that Vasiht’h really looked at the man he’d yoked himself to in a mental and spiritual communion closer than almost any other known in the Alliance. A rare communion, because so few people had the Goddess’s gifts in the strength necessary to forge it. Not all Glaseah could sustain a mindline, and of all the Alliance’s races, only the Glaseah and the Eldritch were known to produce espers at all. He’d been lucky, incredibly lucky, to be able to share what he did with Jahir. It had never occurred to him to think of the ability that made it possible as anything other than a gift from a loving goddess. But it was entirely evident to him now, looking at his partner’s face, that Jahir had other ideas.
“You… don’t think so?” he asked, struggling with his astonishment. “This is a thread of the Goddess’s mind, Jahir, that She is allowing you to share with Her. That’s something to be grateful for….”
“The ability to force my emotional state on others without their permission? From a distance?” Jahir asked. “Is a gift?”
“Why does it have to be about force?” Vasiht’h asked, confused. “You can rape people with your sexual organs, arii, but that doesn’t make sex inevitably evil or violent.”
“And the ability to read their feelings from a distance,” Jahir asked, low. “This invasion of privacy is always a boon.”
“I don’t know how it’s different from being able to read their body language, their eyes, their words—”
“I would think it very different, given one might be mistaken about body language but not about a direct read of their minds—”
“Of their feelings?” Vasiht’h asked, bemused. “When people rarely even know why they feel the things they feel? We’d be out of work if everyone was that self-aware, arii.”
“And if it becomes more than their feelings? If I begin to perceive their thoughts?”
“Then you don’t listen.” When Jahir stared at him, Vasiht’h said, “The way you don’t pay attention to people’s conversations in public? It’s not that you don’t hear them. It’s that you politely don’t notice them.”
“Just… that simple.”
“Of course?” Vasiht’h rubbed his palms together slowly, gathering his thoughts. “I take it that Eldritch think of things like this as… forbidden.”
“They are the province of villains in legends.”
Vasiht’h winced. “I can see how that would make you uncomfortable.”
Jahir’s stare resolved into a reluctant chuckle, one that trailed off too quickly for Vasiht’h’s comfort. His partner was deeply distressed, he thought. Unavoidably, if he had no appropriate role models. Perhaps there could never have been any such role models, at tha
t… from what Vasiht’h had gathered about Eldritch society in the years he’d known Jahir, it would have been incapable of supporting any flowering of the Goddess’s talents. People who did not touch, who guarded their thoughts and their grudges and their hatreds, people who idolized isolation and xenophobia, could never have endured gifts that made them more aware of one another’s spirits. Anyone gentle enough to welcome that gift would have withered beneath what it revealed, if they had survived long enough once their fellows discovered the key they had to their enemies’ souls.
“Jahir,” he said, carefully. “I know that you probably grew up hearing awful things about this. I won’t try to tell you that you should cast off the chains your culture put on you. We both know how hard that is. But you are not just Jahir Seni Galare, heir to the Seni family and the Eldritch path. You’re also Jahir Seni Galare, xenotherapist and Alliance citizen. So maybe that part of you will hear me when I say that among the Glaseah, what you can do now and what you feel is considered just another one of your senses. Like sight, or touch. Just like touch, you need to learn the rules of when it’s all right to use or not. And just like sight, sometimes you’ll see things you didn’t want to see, or shouldn’t act on. But it is a gift, not a curse. A gift. And I’m thrilled you’re developing it.”
Jahir’s voice was soft, to go with the lowered eyes; it was a meekness Vasiht’h didn’t like seeing, because it suggested defeatism. “I don’t know how you can support such a feeling, arii. How can I possibly do our work when I can project myself into our patients’ minds? How will we know what their thoughts are, and what are reflections of my own?”
“By you learning to control your ability?” Vasiht’h said. His brisk tone lifted his partner’s face, and there was startlement in the honey-colored eyes. “Did you think you could get out of that part? That if you didn’t work out how to control your talent, it would go away? It doesn’t work that way, arii. If you pretend it doesn’t exist, it will run wild and take us with it.”
Jahir inhaled. “I don’t want—”
“Neither do I,” Vasiht’h said. “And it won’t happen, because we won’t let it happen.”
“And if I’m unequal to the task?” Jahir asked. “What if I fail, arii?”
“You won’t,” Vasiht’h said. He lifted his hand to forestall the protest. “You won’t,” he repeated more firmly. “Because the Goddess gives us no burdens we are unequal to. And if we have to take some time off to get things sorted, we will, and we’ll come back stronger than ever. Or…” He grinned. “Maybe we don’t come back, and we live on your princely salary while we raise both our families.”
Shocked, Jahir said, “You mean that. After years of bridling against my income.”
“I think I do,” Vasiht’h said, bemused. “Seeing my nephews has made me realize it’s probably easier to do the work of parenting when you’re not distracted. A reduced tempo at work might not be a bad thing.”
“Arii… I don’t know what to say.”
Vasiht’h cocked his head. “Say you’ll at least consider what I’m telling you.”
“I will. I promise it.”
Which was as good as gold, in the case of an Eldritch, and his Eldritch in particular. So Vasiht’h let his curiosity have its way at last and added, wistfully, “Tell me what it’s like?”
Jahir studied him with wonder in his eyes. “You really want to know.”
“Yes?” Vasiht’h asked. And laughed. “I half hope that being bound by the mindline to someone with those talents will develop mine too. But until we run that experiment, you can tell me about it so I can daydream…”
“This is something you would daydream about,” Jahir murmured.
“Yes!” Vasiht’h grinned. “Maybe only villains in your world can touch people’s minds across rooms. But on Anseahla, dva’htihts are hero-saints, and we used to play at being them when we were kids. Sehvi will explode when I tell her. She’ll probably want to send you a mind-flowering present.”
“A… a what?”
“You do that when children evince their mental gifts for the first time,” Vasiht’h said.
“God and Lady,” Jahir said, eyes wide. “We could not be more different!”
“No… so… would you mind telling me?”
“Only if you don’t mind hearing how I almost made my cousin nauseated enough to vomit…!”
“Oh!” Vasiht’h grinned. “So it’s going to be a funny story too!”
For a moment Jahir stared at him. And then he began laughing, helplessly. And that, Vasiht’h thought, was a great improvement. Even though the resulting story had more bittersweetness than humor. His heart ached for his distant partner, who had obviously been left unequipped to see himself through any positive framework. But he thought, as he asked questions and let his enthusiasm and awe leak through their conversation, that Jahir’s shoulders straightened a little, and some of the drawn quality of his face began to ease.
“Lisinthir has said we must practice,” Jahir concluded. “That is where we are supposedly bound when he returns.”
“If there’s one thing Lisinthir’s good at, it’s dealing with the practicalities without letting emotion stop him,” Vasiht’h said. “And much as I hate to admit it, he’s got a gift for teaching. In an unorthodox way.”
No doubt remembering their painful tutoring sessions on the courier, Jahir said wryly, “Unorthodox describes my cousin in totality.”
Vasiht’h grinned. “Yes. But that’s why you need him, and he needs you. He’ll take care of you.”
“I… do think you’re right. And on that note, I should eat ere he returns. He told me I would need it.”
“No doubt,” Vasiht’h said. “Using mental talents eats up as many calories as physical ones. Don’t skimp on your meals just because I’m not there to twist your arm into eating them, please?”
This laugh was almost natural, thank the Goddess. “I shan’t. And arii… thank you.”
“Always. Call me any time you need me.”
“Until we are together again.”
“Until that, yes.” Vasiht’h smiled.
That ended the call, leaving Vasiht’h sitting in front of the emitter. He mantled his wings, sliding them against one another, and savored the wonder of it. That he not only had a partner to love, but that the Goddess should gift that partner so generously… and that in Her wisdom, She might have placed them both in proximity to one another’s hearts to save Jahir for that talent. Because Vasiht’h knew that Jahir would never have accepted it had he been alone.
Your ways, he thought to Her. Are glorious. And then he trotted off to find Sehvi and tell her the good news.
Jahir did his best to do justice to his breakfast in a fashion Vasiht’h would have condoned, but he still found it difficult to eat. He could only imagine what his cousin would say did he return to find Jahir had done nothing but toy with dry toast and tea, though, so by the time Lisinthir swept through the door, he’d managed something like repletion and had retired to a chair with his chemistry journals.
“I find you in better spirits, I see.”
Jahir set the data tablet on his lap and gilded his response. “As you no doubt planned when you set me about that call. How did you know?”
“It did not take a genius,” Lisinthir replied, mouth quirking. “He centers you, cousin. And what you needed was a dosing of common sense to put paid to your abstractions. Yes?”
“There is nothing like a Glaseah for common sense,” Jahir allowed, smiling. “So you have accomplished at least one of your aims. Did you succeed in the other?”
“Indeed… and if you are amenable, we shall go forth to it now.”
Jahir put the data tablet on the table and stood, paused. “Will I need anything?”
“Only your glorious person.” Lisinthir grinned. “The rest your scapegrace cousin has arranged, and God help us both.”
“You fill me with confidence,” Jahir said, wry.
“You shadowed that! I am im
pressed,” Lisinthir said, leading the way out of the suite. “I would have glossed it red.”
Jahir ignored his blush, folding his hands behind his back and pacing his cousin. “Of course you would have. But mentioning it has gotten you what you would have wanted by serving me the innuendo yourself. I trust you are satisfied.”
“Are you?” Lisinthir asked, all innocently neutral.
“Not in the least,” Jahir replied, and did shade it red, for the carnal mode.
“Careful, cousin, or I might push you up against a wall and kiss you senseless. And in a public hall!”
There was no one in the corridor; Jahir had not seen anyone in the halls at all yet, come to that. Curious, he asked, “Would you so dare?”
He had the answer to that a few moments later, and was both chastened and pleased to fall back into step alongside Lisinthir with only a slight tremor in his knees to betray his reaction. Not that it mattered—from the mirth in the glance his cousin flicked him, Lisinthir knew very well what his kisses accomplished.
“I trust you have been enlightened?” Lisinthir said finally.
“Verily, I have been schooled into submission.”
Lisinthir laughed aloud. “Red and silver and white. Too much nuance by half, cousin. I will have to press you harder next time.”
“I look forward to it,” Jahir replied, stubbornly in the crimson still despite what it was doing to his cheeks.
“Delicious.” Lisinthir grinned at him. “But later for that. Come, we should not want to miss our appointment.”
Their appointment with what, he wondered? And knew better than to ask. Best to follow and see for himself.
Lisinthir led him to a central Pad station several floors down, where they joined a trickle of people in the outbound queues. When they reached the head of the line, Lisinthir said, “Two for the Park Dome, Splendor Station.” A chime sounded, a soft androgynous voice repeated their destination, and then they were passing over the Pad into a spacious building, its lines sleekly modern but somehow warmed by the sanded wood paneling that accented the enormous windows. The lodge overlooked a forested slope, its trees shivering beneath a sky the crisp blue of a new spring morning. Glancing out, Jahir could see the starbase’s spindle through the atmosphere of the dome, a faint tracery of white like distant clouds, but more regular by far.
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