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Talis Errison dragged his hand across his face as his suitemate turned on the shower for the fourth time that night, desperately wishing he could walk over there and strap them to their own bed with his spare paracord. Maybe then they would finally fucking sleep. Then, he thought as he looked in the mirror he kept on his desk, maybe he could get some rest too.
He looked down at the blank spaces on the report he was supposed to be filling out, then back at his reflection, and wondered when exactly he’d gotten used to seeing those dark shadows under his eyes. Probably during induction training for the Vanguard, during which one of the tests they’d endured was to see how long they could stay awake without crashing—or breaking. Or after Cordeon…
Talis shook his head and turned back to his mostly-blank report. Then something hit the floor in Stark’s bathroom and he jumped, and he abandoned the report altogether, dropping his head into his hands.
The new Empera was an enigma. A nightmare sometimes, sure, but an enigma first and foremost.
Talis hadn’t been fond of Emperor Tainnos, personally. He’d only encountered xem on a few of his nastier Vanguard excursions, and by chance a few times in the citadel, but he hadn’t particularly liked any of those experiences. He didn’t know much about xem and didn’t care to; he knew xe was a bit of an ass and was more aloof than the rest of them, which made xem a liability. That was all he had needed to know.
But that was when he was a lowly Sergeant in the Imperial Vanguard Battalion an eternity (four months) ago. Now, he was the new Emperade, second in command to the Emperor, the biggest political pawn in the multiverse. He couldn’t afford to ignore the Emperor anymore.
Where Tainnos had been a rude liability, Evansen Stark was a blissfully ignorant one. And just like with everyone else he’d inducted into the Vanguard since he himself was plucked from the Lightblade ranks of the AHDC, he couldn’t tell them anything.
They had to figure it out for themselves. All of it.
The thing was, he didn’t want Stark to go into this blind. Emperor Tainnos was an asshole; Talis would’ve let xem walk into live fire had xe not been the Council’s favorite pawn. But Stark was nice. He didn't want all of this to blow up in their face.
When Talis was scooped out of the Vanguard and appointed the new Emperade, he had been expecting to serve under the same cold, emotionless warrior he’d watched dominate the Tournée de Coronae. Instead, the Razienne he’d met that first day on the residential side of the Palace was friendly, outgoing even. They had asked for his name and where he was from, he told them the former, not the latter, and they asked what he thought of his new position. They had set ground rules for being suitemates, and otherwise left him alone until they were in the Council chambers. They’d left an overall good first impression on him.
Then they started acting weird, going quiet and introspective, and stopped talking to him. And a few nights later, they’d left their rooms around midnight and opened that damn portal to zio’cerual.
After they woke up, he had expected them to be as bitter and cruel as Tainnos. He’d only lived under the one Emperor, and he didn’t really think someone with the mettle to kill for the Aetherian crowns was capable of being anything else. But even though they didn’t remember those first two weeks, Stark wasn’t exactly different from before. They were clueless where the first version of Razienne had been “in the know,” sure, but not worse than that. They’d been snappy, too, but Talis figured that if he had died in one place and woken up in another, having the background that they did, he would have been snappy too. And the weeks he spent working with them afterwards only reinforced his first impression of them: they were, at heart, a good person. Maybe the first good person to ever become Emperor.
He laughed wryly to himself at his own dark joke and leaned back in his swivel chair, letting it roll him away from his desk.
Really, though, Stark wasn’t that bad. They tolerated his nicknames and his moods thus far. If anything, they were too polite, too considerate. Too confused, really, about how they became Emperor and why and what their role was now. They’d realized they were a pawn by now, sure, but not the extent of how literal that was. They had no idea what they were in for, what branch’s PT they were participating in every morning and why.
They didn’t know anything about the Vanguard, or the Emperak’s purpose in it.
The Razienne Talis had known those first two weeks seemed to know everything about Aetheria and their new role as it pertained to the Vanguard and the IAF—although they hadn’t seemed to realize how insignificant that role really was in the grand scheme of things. They had been ignorant but not uninformed. Now they were both. But now they were also, in some ways, innocent.
They weren’t truly innocent; no one was, especially not people who had seen and fought in wars like the ones he and Stark had—and he knew Stark had fought. But they were blissfully unaware of the reality of their own situation, for the time being—unaware of what he did, who he was, and what the true roles of the Emperak were. He didn’t want the veil to be ripped away from them as suddenly as it inevitably would. He knew what it felt like to lose that bone-deep belief that everyone could make amends and undo or make up for their bad deeds.
But members of the Imperial Vanguard couldn’t make up for any of the sins they had committed, Talis knew that down to his very bones. And when Stark realized that—and why—they’d break. Shut down. Just like Talis had, years ago, after the Vanguard was called into Cordeon to settle a “civil dispute” between the Imperial Governor and the peoples’ house, and he learned the truth for himself.
He hated seeing the Vanguard break people like that, the way it had broken him. Every time, he wanted to keep his recruits from it. He’d seen ASMC veterans, recruited into the ranks of the Vanguard to cover up a mission gone wrong, go hollow and fearful when they realized what they’d been inducted into—that was saying something.
Stark dropped something else in the shower—something metal—and Talis made a mental note to show them where the armor cleaning station was before they rusted out that steel trap of theirs.
He sighed and pushed himself out of his chair. His bad ankle, the one he’d rolled too many times as a kid and broken twice in the IAF, cracked and popped as he made his way to the balcony and slid the glass door open. He slipped out, clinging to his side of the banister so Stark wouldn’t see him, and looked out over the bay and the capital. The storm last night had left the crisp scent of ozone in the air.
The problem was, he reasoned, that Stark woke up with so much hope for Aetheria, compared to everyone else in the IAF. They still believed that the Neutral Interference Corps were always helpful, that the Satellite Corps were just following orders, that Home Defense was just about home defense. They didn’t know anything about what the Vanguard really did, who they culled and why, or who they really worked for.
The worst part, perhaps, was that he knew Stark could sense something was wrong—with him, with Aetheria, with all of it. He knew they were going to figure it all out on their own. Being from a war-torn place like Averon, fighting for a rebel cell like they had their whole life, certainly helped them see all the pieces. It was just a matter of time before they figured out the whole puzzle. And when they did, and they realized what their subconscious had gotten them into by winning the Crowns, what their role really was, who was really controlling them… It’d break them.
His new job was to be there to pick up the pieces.
Talis sighed and looked out at the spire of the closest clocktower, watching until the big hand struck the top of the hour—one in the morning—and for a second, everything seemed to flicker. He watched the strings that tethered his home dimension together shimmer in the light of an inconsistent dawn and the blue-green haze of atmospheric regulation gas, and he hoped he’d be able to catch Stark when they fell.
He turned and risked a glance towards their side of the balcony, where yellow light from their bathroom was pouring out into their dark room and onto the balcony. Through the dark, he could see the corner of their messy bed, their comforter and pillow on the floor, and the blade of their knife glinted atop the mattress. He shrunk back as the light went out and Stark left their bathroom empty-handed, presumably having left their armor out to dry. They walked right over to the comforter on the ground, grabbed the spare thermal blanket off the edge of their bed, and the knife, and curled up on the ground with only the comforter as a buffer.
He remembered what that was like, being unable to sleep on anything that wasn’t a shallow voidship bunk or the ground. He’d been that way for years until he’d learned to fall asleep practically on command, wherever and however he could get it. Seeing Stark curl up on their floor like that, just like he and every other IAF recruit had at one time or another, reminded him that they were still younger than him—not by much, only a couple of years, but young enough. He knew they were a fully capable adult and treated them as such. But sometimes…
Sometimes they looked like the seventeen year old they must have been when they got that rune tattooed on their chest.
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