It took a second for the gears behind Kaleta’s violet eyes to start turning after that threat, a glance down at the cane in his hand before she nodded in agreement. She got it, understood what he was getting at. Alex would exercise restraint to an absurd length when it came to himself, but there was no such limit to be found when it was his wife being harmed.
Eleya took that opportunity to play the good cop. “Perhaps you would like to take your seat while we wait for the rest of our party.” She said, a hand coming to rest on Kaleta’s shoulder and gently directing her towards the only other door in the room. The Empress gave him a tiny nod as she ushered the Zeshen away, just enough of a smile on her face to let him know she approved. “Have a drink, if you desire it. The selection here is extensive, the barkeeps unparalleled.”
There was a staff member waiting on the other side of the door, the room beyond decorated in the same gold paint over black lacquer as the gathering lounge, though it appeared to have scenes of mountains with a few more touches of gem-toned color. The waitress - clad in something like black silk from the neck down - bowed deeply and walked Kaleta to the lone circular table in the room.
Alex waited until the door was closed and unceremoniously planted himself in one of the heavily padded chairs, resting the cane in the crevasse where the armrest met the back. It was a little shy of his grandpa’s overstuffed recliner, but he still found it plenty comfortable. Even wide enough that he didn’t feel like he was wedged into it. “Going to come back for these, too.” He muttered to himself as Eleya walked over to the drink cart.
“What was that?” She inquired, pouring something amber into a short glass tumbler.
“These chairs are great. I actually fit.” He patted the armrests to emphasize how great they were. “Nearly everything around here is just big enough for me most of the time.”
“If you need furniture that is more appropriate to your stature, you can easily acquire it. Clearly, there are already plans for such things available, and simply making a chair larger should be trivial.” She poured a second lowball and returned to where Alex was sitting, handing him one and taking the seat to his right.
“I mean, I know.” He did know, right? Sure, he had thought about it. “I can’t just be like: hey Carbon we’re replacing your furniture because every seat is like I’m sitting on a stool that’s a little bit too small.”
Eleya turned to look at him, eyes squinting slightly as a barely audible chuckle turned into a laugh, a very realistic facsimile of someone who was entertained by a joke... Or she actually found that funny. She shook her head. “Carbon does not have any furniture, it was all destroyed in the Cataclysm with her home.”
“Yeah she does. It was there when we moved into the cabin. Neya’s, I guess? I think they wear each other’s clothes fairly regularly, I don’t see why they wouldn’t share furniture.” Both of them wore his clothes fairly regularly too, though that had to do with Humans not producing scent the ‘right’ way and societal expectations of how an entwined couple - or a Zeshen - should smell.
That was not a conversation he was having with Eleya.
“Is it...” Her eyes turned towards the clear crystal fixtures on the ceiling, tapping a claw on the drink in her hand as she tried to recall something. “The main table is a very light wood, thin legs, fully unadorned. The chairs match that. There is a low bench, dark wood, two blue pillows and a green pillow?”
That was incredibly specific, and accurate except for the pillows. They also had a red one. “How did you know that?” His mind instantly went for the worst possible outcome: she had their room bugged. This was in turn shut down by the rational thought that Eleya wouldn’t cop to an intrusion that would wreck her attempt to repair her relationship with Carbon. Certainly not so obviously, and not to someone she knew could be recording her. More so than just recalled memories, which would be damning to the Tsla’o anyway. So Eleya was definitely not admitting to that where anyone would hear it.
“That is the standard furniture for long-term staterooms. She does not have furniture, it is what was installed there.” The Empress swirled the drink in her glass and took a sip, leaning over to him. “As you are married, you probably should be considering what your furniture will be like. Some prefer to split the designs from room to room, or to let a particular feature be chosen by one - Navaren had excellent taste in art and lighting, but he tended towards the most garish furnishings. All of those tapestries in my chambers were selected by him. The gold filigree bed was relegated to a room that we only used when people I did not like visited.”
That did make sense, theoretically you were getting furniture for a lifetime. When had his parents gotten their furniture? They still had the same dining room table, and he’d been napping on the same couch since he was a kid. “Pretty much the same for Human families, I think. In my culture, anyway.”
“Is it so? I feel I have been remiss in learning about you, dear Prince. I have seen scant flickers of your life, but nothing truly substantive.” She reclined and worked on her drink, waiting for him to reply to that.
He really didn’t want her to know anything substantive about his life. Absolutely not. She was technically family, yes. Technically. But not family like Carbon or Neya, or any of his family on Earth, even the distant relatives he didn’t really know. He’d probably even put Amalu and Sergeant Zenshen ahead of her, and they were literally his subordinates now. “Ah, I don’t know if there’s really much to say.”
“Not much to say? As an alien from a culture that is overwhelmingly still veiled to my understanding? Such modesty.” Eleya said this with a knowing smirk, able to pick up that he didn’t want to talk about himself and amused by his ham-fisted deflection. Better than the alternative. “Perhaps you will indulge my curiosity about a different subject?”
That question was how Alex found out that Eleya really liked cussing. A veritable connoisseur of the terms, but her job prevented her from swearing pretty much all of the time. Keeping up appearances and all that. Can’t have the Empress absolutely losing her shit at somebody with swears, no sir. Just a little beheading or some torture though, that’s fine.
Alex led with Carlin’s seven, which he thought was a pretty good place to start until he just casually dropped what was now a slur against the Tsla’o specifically. She took it in stride, finding his reaction more humorous than any offense she might have taken. Eleya had asked about these, after all. Three of those were already at least partially familiar to her, and he advised that she should avoid using one of them unless it was around people from the Commonwealth, Cygnus, or Gliese. This lead into various ways to compound fuck into other swear words, how intonation shaped its meaning in the moment, and the general utility of it specifically.
He was pretty sure that while this conversation was strange but ultimately benign, it was evidence that she trusted him implicitly.
“Now how about... Mm, how about pen- No wait, that wouldn’t be in your dictionary.” Alex leaned back in his chair, shaking his head. He had been avoiding things that were just outright slurs and had slipped into a foreign language by accident.
Eleya gave a disgruntled laugh. “Surely it should be.” She had been enjoying testing the limits of her translator implant, and so far it had been batting a thousand.
“It’s not English.” He shrugged and sipped his drink. It was a lot like whiskey. A little spice, a hint of stone and earth despite not having come from Earth. There were only so many ways to distill grains.
An exasperated grunt, a roll of the eyes. She and Carbon were definitely related. Eleya swirled her glass, an accusatory finger extended at him. “How many languages do your people need?”
Alex cleared his throat. He had written a paper on the language crush and revival that had come with space colonization. “We’re up over six thousand again.”
She leaned forward, incredulous. “Six thousands, not hundreds or tens? You are shitting me.” Once Eleya had grasped what that meant, the saying delighted her. The Tsla version was much longer, but her antennae perked up when she spoke it and a smile crept into her voice despite her skeptical tone.
“Absolutely not. That’s current living languages, by the way. I don’t even want to guess at how many dead languages and dialects we have.” Alex would not admit this to anyone, but he was starting to enjoy talking to Eleya.
“Dead languages?” Her words dripped with disdain and a healthy side of confusion. “How could anyone let that happen?”
“A lot of them are spoken by a very limited group. A few hundred speakers could see a language gone in just a generation or two. Maybe faster if there’s outside influence.” He hadn’t been, but there was a language museum in Köln that contained Earth’s copy of the ‘word vaults’ built throughout Confed space to help avoid another crush. “There aren’t any languages the Tsla’o have left behind?”
She dismissed the idea immediately, waving her hand for emphasis. “No, certainly not. It is unthinkable.”
Alex was pretty sure that was unlikely, even for what was allegedly a monoculture. Even for one whose name indicated they were the living embodiment of their language. Standardized for a long time? Sure, he would believe that. “All this time and you only have one language? ”
She rolled her eyes with an annoyed noise. “Do not be dense, we have three.”
“What? No.” He double checked himself. No one had told him about two other languages the Tsla’o spoke, not even Carbon. Could she be putting him on? Did she do things like that? She was in a particularly good mood. “All right, so Tsla is one, right? What are the rest?”
“Correct, Tsla is the core.” She pantomimed squeezing something in her hands, alcohol sloshing in the glass she didn’t bother to set down. “Then there is Ei-Tsla, obviously.”
Alex shook his head. “I don’t know what that is.” His translator caught it as a name, which was nice. Hadn’t heard that particular prefix before, unfortunately, so he couldn’t even really guess at its meaning.
Her ears and antenna lifted, surprised by that and a little confused. “Is it so? I am sure you recall feeling them in our link, even if you did not understand them. Certainly you must be very familiar by now because of Carbon and Neya? You are linking with them, yes?”
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
“Oh. So it’s not a spoken language?” The link was a big part of their experience, having a sort of specific way to talk about it made sense, though this seemed more like she was talking about the feelings within the link. Which they would naturally have spent a long time getting specific with. He’d file how often he was linking with them into the big folder of things Eleya didn’t need to be privy to.
“That is correct. There are definitions that can be spoken, but they are best and truly learned by experiencing them.” Eleya had taken on the countenance of someone who thought they could be a grade school teacher, sounding like she was trying to saw big concepts down into little bites so he didn’t choke on them.
“I’m sure they are.” He was a little surprised she didn’t press him on the link thing, but didn’t bring that up. “And the third language?”
“Ahn-tsla.” There was a distinct shift in her tone when she said it, her voice pitched down a little bit. The word was low and luscious, rolling off her tongue like smoke and less sibilant than normal Tsla words.
Once again he recognized the root but hadn’t heard that prefix. Or that pronunciation, for that matter. Alex shook his head, shoulder lifting in apology. “Nope.”
She arched an eyebrow at him, disapproving of this information and letting it fill out her voice. “Surely you have learned some of it by now?”
“I don’t think so.” He sure as hell would have remembered hearing something with that delivery out of Carbon or Neya... Or anyone, for that matter.
That got him an indignant snort, Eleya’s eyebrows pulled down “Did you not read the books I gave you?”
“Oh, I’ve flipped through them.” While Alex had looked at the page Carbon had shown him - and was reasonably sure he had become familiar with some of the contents through other means - even that was a stretch.
“Flipped through one?” Eleya interrupted as her eyebrows went down further, now at full disapproval. “Those are hand-copied, one does not flip through a book like that.”
“Really? Someone has an interesting job.” He laughed quietly, a sly smirk hidden as he looked at the booze cart. “That’s a little inaccurate, actually. I read it for the articles. The essays in the Zeshen special edition are actually a really interesting look into Tsla’o philosophy.”
“If you have only taken one thing in those books seriously, I am glad it is that.” She grumbled, unable to be annoyed at his interest in keeping an inherently unbalanced relationship from becoming harmful. Eleya then leveled a finger at him. “You will read those books, starting at the first page and ending only at the last. You are to be a thorough husband, you will speak Ahn-Tsla as though it is a part of you. I am sure both Carbon and Neya will be able-”
She stopped, ears twitching up and arcing towards the door to the hallway.
Alex didn’t consider himself to be very prudish, and he felt like he had some pretty good evidence to back that up, but it was really weird to have his aunt lecture him about reading the Tsla’o version of the Kama Sutra, so this was a welcome change. “That them?”
Eleya shifted her ears back down, though the one pointed at the door remained lifted for the moment. “Indeed.”
He could just barely hear the door close now that he was listening, quiet footsteps coming down the hall. Carbon emerged first, wearing one of her more fancy looking coats in her preferred shade of blue, like a dark sapphire. Neya followed in the jacket that was technically his - deep red and carrying the stars and sea motif should she need to represent him, tailored to her frame so she didn’t look like a teen wearing her parents clothes. That attire was going to be rough for Kaleta.
They both carried a very distinct look of apprehension, too. Suddenly summoned by the Empress to a private dinner, probably with no explanation as to why. Not exactly the way a good time starts. While that wasn’t wrong, they were left to figure out why on their own. Alex figured that ‘dad showed up for a little kidnapping’ was not on the list, but ‘actually that relationship is forbidden’ was.
He stood up abruptly, set his glass down and marched across the small room with a smile that came easily to him. He was actually glad to see Carbon, her presence lifting his spirits in a way that he hadn’t expected. She hadn’t expected it either, just starting a greeting when he picked her up in a bear hug that transitioned her words into a startled squeak. “I have had a hell of an afternoon.” He said that very loudly. He had. That was true. Alex continued very, very quietly, now that his face was basically next to her ear. “We’re fine.”
“I am sorry...” She relaxed when he told her that, though her feet still twitched like she was trying to get purchase on the ground. “What has happened?”
“Quite a bit, actually.” He set her back down and straightened her jacket out, stepping aside to let her into the room properly. Carbon walked past him and he repeated that greeting with Neya, just with more decorum. She didn’t get picked up, though the same message got delivered. “Probably grab a seat, there’s some stuff to discuss.”
They did, taking the chairs on either side of Eleya, Carbon sitting in the one that he had just vacated. There had only been three around that table, facing the small room for easier socializing. Now they were sitting there staring at him like he was about to give a lecture, or possibly take an order. He looked to Eleya, there in the middle. “Would you like to get us started?”
“I was not there for most of this incident, dear Nephew.” She took a sip of her drink, still working on the first glass. “You are better equipped to relay it.”
“I suppose.” Ugh. He really didn’t want to do this, but here it goes. “Earlier today the Starbound arrived in Sol and docked with the Sword. While your-”
“My father’s ship is here?” Carbon cut him off, glancing at the door to the dining room, apprehension creeping into her eyes already. “That is impossible, the drives are not that fast.”
“It left Tsla’o space a few days after the the Sword did, carrying senators and personnel who were not able to get on board it before it left.” He wasn’t there for any of the stuff he’d said so far. That was kind of annoying. “It was in transit when the Sword arrived in Sol.”
Carbon squinted as she ran the numbers, nodding slowly. “Yes, that... is reasonable. That is how fast it should go.” She didn’t exactly relax, there was too much secrecy surrounding things for her to not know that something bad happened.
“Right. So, your father declined to come with them. He requested...” That was a lie, per what Kaleta had said. Yes, he had said it to protect Carbon from the truth of what had gone on, but what had Sharadi done to earn having any of these blows softened? “He forbade her from coming as well. She snuck on board anyway.”
“Kaleta is here?” Neya interjected, surprised and excited. Carbon looked a little hopeful, as well.
“Hang on.” He held up a hand, hoping to get their hopes down to a level where it wouldn’t hurt as bad when the actual goings on of the day landed. “While the ship was en route, we were married, and Sharadi... Flipped out. He apparently spent most of the trip whipping up Kaleta and a few of his friends on board to remove me from the Sword and return me to Earth, then convince Eleya to reverse what she’d done.”
He looked at the growing unease on Carbon and Neya, and Eleya gave him a little nod. “She, you know, took his place.” Alex made the motion of putting a sigil on like Neya did when she represented either of them. “And lead a couple of them to arrest me or whatever they thought they were going to do.” He petered off there, watching Carbon’s gaze shift down to her hands in her lap as concern gave way to melancholy.
Eleya set her hand on Carbon’s arm, patting it softly. “The whole truth, Prince. I may have asked for leniency in your response, but they deserve none in the telling.”
Alex sighed, a little annoyed that she was right. All of this would come out. He would rip the bandaid off now. This time it was the appropriate choice. “They found me in the gym, in the fighting court to spar with Master Tenaha, which was lucky for them. Senator Hatae comes at me swinging, punches me in the face a couple of times before I figure out it’s not a training exercise and respond. Mateku follows him and hits me with his cane pretty hard. Tenaha stepped in, just knocked him out cold before he could take another swing at me.”
He did not point out that Carbon was sitting with her elbow almost resting on the cane that had been one or two blows away from killing him.
Maybe he didn’t want to keep it.
“Zenshen and a couple of my guys were in play at that point and whatever they thought they were trying to do was over. Hatae and Mateku are in the sickbay because they got wrecked, and they’ll be joining the other two in the brig. I collected Dad and a medkit, and we went to visit Eleya. He was still unhinged, but Kaleta seems to be willing to consider that I’m not some kind of barbarian defiling h-” Ok, he would pull one punch right now, mostly for himself. If he finished that sentence he actually was going to want to have Sharadi’s teeth pulled. “The Throne.”
Carbon looked up at him with doleful eyes and lips pressed thin, nodding slowly. She didn’t try to speak, shoulders slumped, defeated by this violent retaliation over who she loved by her remaining parent. People who she loved, who were supposed to care about her, once again choosing their own desires over hers.
Just on the other side of the Empress, Neya was diametrically opposed in her reaction. Her gaze hardened and posture stiff, leaning forward with her jaw set and ready to act, the tip of her tail switching back and forth in a manner Alex hadn’t seen before. There was hate in her heart, both the people she cared about harmed by this idiocy, and she was ready to sharpen it into a weapon.
“That is where I come in.” Eleya finally deigned to join the conversation in a more material fashion. “Early forensics on his communications indicate he did not want the Prince harmed. He was angry, but he has not fully lost his senses even if he did send a violent drunkard as his vanguard. I have asked the Prince to be lenient with him. He fills an important role right now and... He is my brother. This is partially my fault. I know what he is going through, I lost my love through senseless circumstances as well, and I have not been present for him. I believe he can be swayed by Kaleta and those she carries, which is why we are to have dinner with her tonight.”
That little admission had not been part of anything that they had talked about before now. He was as sure as he was getting that Eleya was earnest in her desire to fix her relationship with Carbon. She wouldn’t be bullshitting about something this serious, though she might bend the truth a little. Taking on any culpability? That was entirely unexpected. “I think getting your dad on board with us is the best idea. I don’t want to see you lose any more family. I don’t want more people dead because of me. Kaleta is our way forward. Where your father was furious, she was worried about you. Where Sharadi shouted, she listened. If she truly carries your mother, it will show.”
Carbon stood silently and slipped her arms around his waist, holding him tightly and listening to his heartbeat. “I will try. I do not want to lose more family either, but-” She paused and her jaw worked for a few seconds. “I will if it must be done to protect what I wish to last.”
That was heavier than he expected. Alex glanced over at the peanut gallery. Neya had softened just a smidge, but she still looked mad. Eleya actually appeared a little uneasy at Carbon’s statement. Alex’s warning that she would actually, finally shut her out and walk away made all the more real now that her own father was on the same chopping block. She had expected this to be a slam dunk. Let’s all pitch in so we can keep the family together! A wake up call could be good for a person, now and then.
The door to the dining room chimed, a fine little bell in the handle announcing that it was about to be opened from the other side. Everyone turned to watch as the handle twisted a few seconds later and the door swung open just enough for the waitress to slip through, the sound of Kaleta wailing in anguish following her before she closed the door. “I am very sorry to intrude, Empress. Prince. Princess.” She said, bowing deeply for each of them and then once more for Neya even if she didn’t get an honorific. “I regret I must inform you that your other guest is deeply out of sorts and we are summoning a medical team for her.”