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It is the night of your official handfasting to Jade English, Executive Commandant of Free Earth, and your soon-to-be-moirail looks positively radiant. Taller than most highbloods, with her normally-bound midnight hair arranged in a mass of curls and flowers and her normally-armored body striding up to the stage in the most beautiful little white dress you have ever seen, like seafoam frothing all around her thighs and breasts, and you have to bite the inside of your cheek to keep from blushing. Burn and blade scars mottle her powerful arms and her eyes sweep the crowd like chips of moonlight and no wonder you won, all of you, when the human resistance joined the trollish.
Jade English looks like someone built a queen out of the night sky, brown and black and infinitely deep, and when she takes her place at your side and smiles for the cameras every chisel-sharp tooth is as bright and deadly as a star.
You take her hand in front of all your people, and she takes yours, and together you wind the white cord around and around your clasped fingers. Her hot, rough-calloused fingers tremble against yours, very minutely, and you wonder if you're crazy or just really, really dumb. You wonder if she resents you for asking for this. If she's going to hate you. If you deserve her hatred. You wonder how you could ever have thought this arrangement might work.
“You ready?” you ask gently, carefully, and the most important human in the galaxy sticks her tongue out at you. Several of your organs do a giddy flip. Then the knot is tied and that’s it, you’re quadranted.
You raise your joined hands above your heads to a deafening storm of celebration, screaming and stomping and howling all together, cheering for you.
"LET'S OPEN THIS PIT UP," you yell, starting forward into the rapturously violent crowd. But then you're pulled short by your joined hand, and Jade English is running a hot rough finger across the tines of your fin and she's got the most filthy grin on you've ever seen, so okay, there will be time for moshing later.
Right now you think the two of you need to be alone.
*
In your private quarters Jade is just as poised and brisk as you’ve ever seen her across a negotiating table. She kicks off her bright little shoes with a sigh and starts to pick the flowers and pearls out of her hair. When she drops heavily on to one of your squashy armchairs you can see the dark glint of a gun holster on the inside of one well-muscled thigh. Your face goes hot and you have to swallow a few times— she sees you looking and grins wickedly, twitches her skirt high enough for you to see she’s got a frankly enormous knife strapped to the other leg.
“So that does it for you?” she says. “I mean, I watched a lot of pale porn to get ready for this, so—”
“This is a show marriage,” you interrupt nervously. “That’s what it’s cod in human, right? It’s only political.”
Jade raises an eyebrow at you. “Yeah?” she says.
“Yeah,” you say. “I mean, it’s not like I don’t, um, appreseate the gesture, Commandant English—”
“Jade,” Jade says. She has taken her gigantic knife out and is trimming her pale fingernails even with the tips of her human fingers.
“Jade,” you say. You watch her finish trimming her nails with all your words dead on your tongue.
She puts the knife back in its holster, stands up, smooths her fluffy seafoam skirts down over her weapons, and stalks towards you.
“I’m human, right?” she says. You nod warily. “And humans don’t do pale romance, and you wouldn’t want to force me to do anything I don’t want to, blah blah, I’m too young—”
“Wait, are you?” you blurt, a little distracted.
“I’m nineteen,” she says, which relieves you until you remember that she’s counting in human, which means she’s like barely eight sweeps.
Oh god, you’re a cave-robber.
She touches your throat, very softly, and you are abruptly aware of the frantic pounding of your heart.
“Do you think I won us this war by asking nicely, Empress?” Jade English wants to know. “Do you think I didn’t lose count of how many of your kind I left broken behind me on the battlefield?”
Human hands evolved on brachiating creatures, not burrowing: they’re made for grasping. The blunt fingers splay, the thumb rotates all the way back, and she makes a perfect burning collar around your throat with her hand. You wouldn’t know the first thing about breaking this kind of grip.
You make a noise that might be transcribed as hngh.
She bends down to press her soft lips to your forehead, just above your circlet. Her fingers tense on your neck, relax, and you’re breathing each other’s breath. Her other hand comes up to the small of your back and you’re caught there, held, pinned.
“Of course, this could just be a show marriage,” she says. “Amicable even! Right? We could be great friends.” And she makes as if to step back.
Your grab at her. “No,” you blurt out, and she laughs. Her teeth are so sharp.
When she picks you up and carries you back to the armchair you don’t struggle— daringly, you loop your arms around her shoulders, and let her settle you into her lap. Your knees go on her thighs as she sprawls back, and her big hot alien hands cup your hips. She kisses your throat, nips at your fin and— oh— you’re purring, rubbing your cheek dazedly to the silk and petal softness of her hair.
“Let’s see how this works,” she murmurs.
You don’t remember much of the rest of the night.
*
The first council meeting after your handfasting is actually going pretty well, until about halfway through discussing export tariffs, when one of your admirals gets bored.
“I have a motion,” he announces.
“Yes, Admiral Wavepunch?” you ask.
“I motion that we come up with a better plan than the one you came up with after checking the contents your diaper stub this morning, Empress,” he says, and there’s a ripple of amused ooh-ing. Jade goes tense by your side: she’s been taking some kind of human-style notes with a little pad of paper and a pencil, but now she sets them down on the table with sort of an ominous click.
“Mocean denied,” you say briskly. “I’ve flushed diaper-loads down the gaper that were smarter than the whale school of you nasty clowns pod together, and this morning was no exception.”
More ooh-ing, and for a minute you think you’re going to get things back on track. But it looks like pretty much everyone's bored with export tariffs, because Commandant Knifebulge stands to make a motion.
“I motion that I be allowed to fight the Empress for command of the Empire, because getting a fork through my eardrums would actually be better than having to listen to another word out of any of your diseased squawk chambers. If I were Empress we would eat ice cream all night while fondling each and every one of our genitals, and still get more done than this wiggler’s managing at present.”
“Motion sustained,” several of your highest ranking advisors chorus, and one adds, “I really want to get back to fondling all my genitals. I wasn’t done with half of them before I dragged into this dull-ass shitshow.”
Well, what the hell. Export tariffs are boring as hell, and Knifebulge is actually kind of cute.
“Mocean denied,” you say, leaning forward on your elbows, “Because you smell bad.”
“Fuck you!” Knifebulge yells.
“I’d preefer naught, because, again, you smell bad.”
Knifebulge roars challenge and launches herself across the table at you, knuckledusters at the ready. You clash and tangle, rolling across the floor, pulling hair and snapping your fangs and kicking off your shoes to rake one another with your hindclaws. Your advisors are all standing on their chairs for a better look and cheering for either of you indiscriminately—
—and then Knifebulge is ripped off you and thrown to the floor like a landed fish, and your moirail is there with a pistol pressed to the side of the highblood’s head.
“What?” Knifebulge has time to say, and then Jade fires.
Everyone goes very quiet. Knifebulge jerks and kicks on the floor, then gradually goes still. Jade watches the room her pistol held down and out, looking very much like she wants someone to give her another chance to use it.
“Jade, what the fuck,” you say. She doesn’t spare you a glance.
“The highblood’s not dead,” she says. “I just blew out most of his motor functions— you should be able to interrogate him in a few hours.”
“Knifebulge is female,” you say blankly.
“I can’t actually tell your genders apart,” she says. “Also I don’t give a damn. Who else was in on this attack?”
Wavepunch is astoundingly underserved either in the pitch quadrant or the cranial anatomy, because he raises a hand.
“I was gonna fight her next...?” he says hesitantly, and then has to duck when Jade shoots at him. That finally breaks you from your shock and you throw yourself bodily at Jade, hauling her gun arm down and patting at her face. Someone with some psi manages to do something bright and fizzy to her gun, and then you have to grab her other arm to keep her from going for her knife.
“Jade, shoosh!” you say, soothing at her as best you can. “Clam your glubbing tits, what the shell! Are you out of your coddamn mind!?”
She ducks her head away from your fingers. “Cut it out, shoosh-papping doesn’t work on humans,” she says irritatedly, and then there’s a mass scramble of trolls attempting to get to the other side of the room first.
“You married that!?” someone yelps, and there is a ragged chorus to the tune of “god help us, we’re all going to die.”
Jade grins at them, and manages to get her fingers around her knife. You remember some of the reports you’ve read on what humans call ‘interrogation’.
“Okay, you bunch of bassholes,” you say hastily to the room, “please figure out the export tariffs while I figure out what the shell does work on humans. I don’t think the honeymoons' over yet.”
Jade tries to get free to go for Wavepunch. You kick her in the back of the leg, then drag her out of the room on her ass while she curses.
The trip to your hivesuite is as short as you can make it, but you learn a hell of a lot of human cuss words.
*
“What the fuck, Jade?” you demand, when you’ve managed to haul her past a door that locks worth a cuttleshit.
“What do you mean what the fuck!?” she shrieks, and shakes you off to yank at the doorknob. “They attacked you! You need to round everyone up and interrogate to figure out how deep this plot runs, not scamper away and act like I’ve lost my shit for no fucking reason!”
“Oh my god you absolute cucumber!” you shriek back. “She was just having some fun! We were all having some glubbing fun! Don’t humans have fun!?”
“We don’t try to claw each other’s faces off when we have fun!” Jade lets you know.
“WE DON’T SHOOT PEOPLE IN THE HEAD WHEN WE HAVE FUN,” you let her know. You are both crowded up to each other, chest-to-chest, baring teeth.
“You do when you’re having fun with humans,” Jade says, deadly quiet all of a sudden. “That was kind of the central issue of the last, you know, fifty years.”
This is kind of a punch to the nook. “That wasn’t us,” you say. “I mean like, not us us.”
Jade just gives you a long nasty look, and strides off to face the opposite wall, her arms crossed. Her shoulders are shaking.
“We all did bad shit during the war,” she finally says. Her voice is hoarse and quiet. “We all— we did some real bad shit. Like, for example, shooting people in the head, or eating people’s families.”
Oh.
You come up behind her very slowly, making sure your footsteps ring out clearly. You put your arms around her waist and rest your cheek against her back. You can hear the in-out rasp of her twinned air sacs, her four-part heartbeat. You don’t know what her human flesh would taste like, but you know that a lot of your council could make an educated guess.
You’ve all done bad shit.
“They just look like people to you,” she says. “Like I know trolls are people but they’re—do you know how long fifty years is, to humans? Do you know how bad war fucks us up? All my life I’ve been in this war, all my fucking life. This war started happening to my grandparents and it took until me to stop it. That’s how fucked up we are.”
“Shh,” you say. “Shhhh, shh.”
“That doesn’t work on us,” she says, and her voice cracks.
“Bullshark,” you say, and tug her around, push her gently down to sit. You climb into her lap, put your cheek to her chest and purr for her. It’s different this time, no smooth seduction, no bright fire and clever, confident fingers. No manipulation. It’s something flayed and honest now, something real, as you curl into the broken cup of her body and wonder how to fix what you find there.
She doesn’t cry, and you wonder if that’s another one of the things that don’t work for humans. But you weep, and every few minutes her fingers come up, dangerous and deadly, and she wipes away your tears.
“I’ll do anything to keep this peace,” she finally murmurs. “Do you understand, Feferi? Anyone, anything, trying to destabilize it has got to go through me, and I have done a lot of bad shit, okay? I am the Executive Commandant of doing bad shit.”
“And I’m your Empress,” you say. “And your moirail. I’m Executive Commandant of keeping you from doing bad shit. We’re just going to have to keep the peace without any bad shit whatsoever going down, okay?”
“That’s dumb.”
“That’s what you agreed to when you married me, so, like, you’re dumb,” you point out.
She snorts, but there’s some laugh to it. Just a bit. Just enough.
*
You wake up the next night feeling like several chunks of deep-fried crap. You roll over in your slime and every single scratch on you decides to throb all at once, and you moan.
Jade has dragged her armchair over to the side of the recuperacoon, and she reaches down to pat your head.
“So it turns out Needledick had venom glands spliced in to her clawbeds!” she says, way too brightly. “Specifically venom glands designed to mess with the functioning of expanding and contracting aquatic vascular systems, thus posing a significant risk of brain damage and dying in your gosh darn sleep. Not, I guess, that we’d notice that right away, Miss Everyone Is Pals Even When They’re Punching Me In The Fucking Head.”
You glare at her.
“There’s no antidote other than waiting it out,” Jade says. She’s still smiling, why is she smiling. “You’re going to feel like crud for probably a week. You’re going to need a cane. I’m never letting you live this down. I shot like three more conspirators and your council has been doing whatever the hell I tell them to, so we got the export tariffs done while you were passed out from the assassination attempt, no problem.”
You open your mouth with a monumentally painful effort, roll over just a little, and close your teeth on the hot meat of her hand. You now know what humans taste like: they taste gross. Why the hell did your predecessor think humans were any good as livestock, they are clearly only good for making too much noise and being big jerks.
Jade continues to pat your hair, and when she throws in some horn scritches you decide to forgive her for being frankly heinous amounts of smug at you. You lick her teeth marks, apologetically, and roll back over in the slime.
“Pale for you, you little shit,” Jade says, smugly.
You make a monumental effort, and splash her in the face. While she sputters, you say, “Pale for you too, jerkass,” with numb lips, then wriggle far enough under the slime that she can’t reach you.
You’re just considering all the pitch and ashen porn you’re going to need to bring her up to speed on so she doesn’t tear the head off the next poor grunt to bat his eyelashes at you funny, when Jade plunges into the sopor after you.
“Oh, no you don’t!” she says, attempting to haul you into the harsh and unforgiving universe outside your recuperacoon. You brace your burning limbs in the opening and yowl at her, but it doesn’t help— she plants a foot on the rim and pops you out neat as pearl.
You roll squealing and kicking across the floor in a snail-slime trail of sopor and wild yelling. Jade gets a handful of your hair and reels you in to blow a raspberry across your gillslits, and the resulting howl of anguish actually summons your guards.
“It's time for tickles,” Jade informs you. “You wanted to wrestle, Empress! You brought this on yourself! See how frisky you are after you meet the tickle fingers of doom.”
“Save yourshells!” you shriek at them, clawing at your aggressor. “She’s mad! She’s unstoppable!”
Six full-grown and heavily-armed highbloods scatter like squeakbeasts, leaving their empress to her tragic and extremely stupid demise.
This is going to work, you realize, in between screaming your head off and attempting to kick your moirail in the face. This isn’t just some careful political stunt, this has never been about politics. This is honest-to-fuck real life serendipity, this is going to work.
You succeed in kicking the most powerful, most important, most dangerous creature in the universe in the face and she laughs wildly as she tries to get a grip on your sopor-slicked horns.
This is going to work out just fine.