Page 14 of Dax: Gratefully Bonded
“Exactly,” Aiden said. “He needs something to give him purpose. But in your case, there’s an extra dynamic here that’s very much going to work in your favour. And that is that youneed help. Dax wants to look after you-”
“Dax doesn’t want to look after me,” I objected immediately. “He hates me.”
“No, he doesn’t,” Aiden said, leaning forward, his tone gentle. “He simply believes that you hate him.”
I sat up in shock at that, and my gaze snapped across to Kade. “Does he?” I asked the dimari.
Kade hesitated before answering, but then he said, reluctantly, “Probably. If you refuse to give him any tasks to do, his natural assumption would be that you don’t believe he’s capable of performing them to an adequate standard.”
“How would you feel,” Aiden asked, as gently as he could manage, “if all day, every day, the one person you cared about the most kept telling you that you weren’t good enough?”
“Fuck me,” I muttered, pressing a hand to my eyes. “Are we going to get to the bit where we fix this soon, or is this just going to be a session of telling Zeke how he’s fucked everything up?”
“I’m not trying to make you feel worse,” Aiden said. “But you need to understand Dax’s perspective on life. Otherwise you’re just going to keep trying to get him to do something that he’s not capable of doing; namely, taking charge of his own life.”
I closed my eyes and took a slow breath. “Okay, fine. So he wants to help me. But that doesn’t mean I can just sit around all day and let him wait on me hand and foot. I’m not some fucking invalid who needs my diaper changed.”
Aiden said nothing. But his gaze drifted slowly around the room, from the visible dirt on the carpet, to the pile of laundry on one of the chairs – to my shame, I couldn’t even remember if it was clean or dirty – to the wall comm by the door. It was flashing red, indicating that it had unread messages on it… and a quick check of my own comm revealed that I had a total of ninety-three pieces of mail that I hadn’t even opened, dating back a good six months.
“Are you aware that the military has been paying your power and water bills and charging them against your pension?” Aiden asked softly. “If they hadn’t been, you wouldn’t even have electricity anymore. They’ve also been paying Dax to be your carer, by the way. Henderson opened an account in Dax’s name and they’ve been depositing money into it each fortnight. Which you would have known, if you’d read your mail.”
I thought about sorting through all of that mail, and then having to deal with all the administration tasks that would result from it; paying bills, organising repairs, making appointments. I thought about tackling the various piles of laundry littered about the house, or the sink full of dishes in the kitchen. I could launch into it full of determination and good intentions, but I knew myself well enough to know that after about an hour, I’d get discouraged by the lack of progress, overwhelmed by the amount of work to be done, and curl up on the sofa with a bottle of vodka and a sports channel on the wall screen.
“Okay, so maybe you have a point,” I conceded grumpily. “I suppose I could use a hand to straighten the place up.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Dax
The outdoor courtyard was actually quite nice. Pulling out the weeds and sweeping up the leaves was something that my master had never told me not to do, and so I’d made that the main focus of my energy for the past year, hoping, wishing that one day, he would notice the effort I was putting into it and tell me I’d done a good job.
So far, that hadn’t happened.
For now, though, I wasn’t tidying the small garden beds. I was just sitting, looking at the garden, and wondering whether now, finally, something was going to change in this unexpectedly subdued life I’d been given. But would it be a change for the better, or the worse?
I didn’t look up when the back door opened. Or when it closed again. Someone was standing there watching me, but I knew it wasn’t my master. “Dax? Can we talk?” a voice said, and my head snapped around as I realised it was Aiden. I’d assumed they’d send Kade to me again, to explain how I was supposed to be behaving, or to give me details of what other misunderstandings had made my master hate me.
“Of course,” I said, hastily springing up from my seat. I dusted off the other garden chair, setting it neatly beside the table. “Please, sit down,” I invited him, like the good host I had been taught to be. This was the first time my master had had any visitors, but I still remembered my training. I thought about offering him and Kade something to drink… and then remembered that we didn’t have anything other than water. Or alcohol. But I didn’t think he’d appreciate being offered a beer at half past nine in the morning.
Aiden sat down in the chair opposite the one I’d been sitting in, and gestured for me to sit down as well. I glanced at Kade.
“I’ll stand,” he said, looking completely comfortable that way, so I sat, bracing myself for whatever they were about to say. Had my master decided to return me, so he could buy a domestic companion instead? Was he going to send me away to get extra training?
“We’ve had a good chat with Ezekiel,” Aiden began. “And I think we’ve cleared up some of the misunderstandings he had about your skills and your training. He understands that he needs to start doing things a bit differently – giving you more direction, for example, or telling you when you’ve done a task well, versus when it needs to be improved.”
“That would be wonderful,” I said, feeling the beginnings of a weight lifting from my chest. So far, all my master had done was tell me not to do a task, without telling me anything about what I was doing wrong.
Aiden nodded. “He’s willing to put in a significant amount of effort, but at the same time, you need to realise that you’re going to have quite a challenge ahead of you.” Aiden was facing me squarely, his expression serious, and the natural authority in his stance had me paying close attention. He wasn’t my master, but he was clearly used to giving orders. “How much do you know about your master’s medical condition?” he asked.
I’d never thought about it in a diagnostic sense, so I stopped to consider how best to answer. “I know he sometimes limps on his right leg,” I said, starting with the purely physical problems. “He has a scar on his side from where he was injured, when we first met. He doesn’t like to be in enclosed spaces. He has nightmares. I hear him sometimes when he wakes up. And I know he drinks… a lot of alcohol.” I’d been about to say ‘too much alcohol’, but far be it for a dimari to judge their master’s actions. “He doesn’t seem to be very happy. And I wish I could do something about that,” I added, though that had not been part of the question.
Aiden nodded. “My understanding is that most dimari are given a reasonable level of medical training. You’re taught first aid, CPR, how to treat mild to moderate wounds. But have you been taught much about mental illnesses? Or how to help a patient manage them?”
“No,” I said simply. “I don’t think our trainers would have anticipated us needing to know something like that.”
Aiden nodded. “I suspected as much. So I’m going to try and explain what’s wrong with Zeke in relatively simple terms.” He spent the next ten minutes explaining a problem that he called post-traumatic stress disorder. I’d never heard of it before, but it apparently came with a wide variety of possible symptoms; insomnia, anxiety, panic attacks, flashbacks, mood swings – the list went on. But despite my lack of familiarity with it, I could match a large number of Aiden’s descriptions to behaviours I’d seen in my master.
“The upshot of all of this,” Aiden said, as the explanation drew to a close, “is that Zeke needs a lot of help managing his day to day life. He needs reminders to attend appointments. He needs someone to make sure he’s eating healthy food. There’s a doctor at the military base who’s going to be coordinating a recovery plan from his alcohol addiction. But at the same time,he’s going to be fairly resistant to actually accepting help. That’s not because you’ve done anything wrong. It’s just because that can be how some people react to traumatic situations; they would prefer to pretend that nothing is wrong, rather than confronting the trauma.”