Page 26 of Dax: Gratefully Bonded
As we were finishing the last slices of toast, I braced myself for the next challenge of the day. “The weather’s nice this morning,” I said with deliberate nonchalance. “It would be a good time to go for a walk.”
“I don’t want to go for a fucking walk,” he snapped at me, stabbing his toast with his butter knife.
“Yes, sir,” I muttered, ducking my head and hunching in on myself. His hand reached for something again… and this time, I noticed it was shaking slightly. Damn it. In my agitation about last night and the burned toast, I’d forgotten his tablet.
I got up, abandoning the last of my toast, to go and fetch one, but before I reached the door to the kitchen, my master abruptly said, “Sit down. Finish your breakfast.”
Like a marionette on strings, I sat, obediently guiding the corner of the slice into my mouth. “Would you like some coffee?” I asked, once I’d swallowed. Yes, he’d given me a direct order to sit down, but if he gave me a different one – to get him somecoffee, for example – then I wouldn’t technically be breaking his first order. “Or some juice?” I offered next, when he didn’t respond to my question.
“No, I want a fucking glass of vodka,” he snarled at me.
I paused to consider my own actions for a moment. I’d been trained to pick up on the slightest nuances of my master’s behaviour – a sideways glance, a smile that might indicate a preference for one style of cooking or another, hints of annoyance about which tasks were completed sooner, rather than later. So my master’s current mood was like being screamed at, emotions lit up in neon pink and electric blue.
But that wasn’t to say that those emotions were completely without nuance. I’d figured out very quickly that my master had both a hero complex, and a self-destructive streak. At the moment that I’d met him, he’d been bleeding onto the cargo bay floor of his ship, poisoned and in pain, but he’d forbidden me from treating his wounds until his crew mates were taken care of. And he’d ordered me to retrieve the alcohol from his crewmate’s bunk, even when he knew it would be a bad idea, given his impending need for surgery.
In the back of my mind was also the keen knowledge that my master hadn’t actually instructed me to do anything to look after him – not giving him his tablets, not taking him on walks, not waking him from unpleasant dreams. I was following Aiden’s orders, not my master’s. And while I wasn’t technically disobeying my master, I was taking an unprecedented number of liberties with my interpretations of his wishes.
The problem was that hiding meekly in corners and staying out of his way had achieved exactly nothing for the past year. Meanwhile, cooking dinner unannounced and opening puzzle boxes without permission had gotten him to eat and distracted him from his own self-destructive habits – albeit temporarily.
My trainers had taught me to obey my master. But at the same time, they had taught me to love him. Though I wasn’t entirely sure whether he would ever love me.
I shoved the rest of my slice of toast into my mouth, chewed a cursory number of times, then swallowed. Okay, I’d finished my breakfast. I’d completed my master’s order.
I stood up, gathered my plate and the now-empty bowl that had held the fruit, and ferried them both to the kitchen. Then I took a glass out of the cupboard, filled it with water and marched back to the dining table, setting it down more noisily that strictly necessary in front of my master.
He looked up at me in surprise. “What’s that?” he asked.
“Vodka,” I told him. “You said you wanted a glass.”
He eyed the glass like it was a snake about to bite him. “We got rid of all the alcohol,” he said, sounding less certain now. Less like a bear growling, and more like a puppy whining.
“Yes, but there was some hidden in one of the cupboards.” That wasn’t actually a lie, though I was certainly twisting the truth. There had been some, hidden in the bathroom cupboard; the bottle I had disposed of yesterday.
My master looked aghast. “Are you fucking serious?” he asked me, a different kind of anger rising.
“No,” I said, deciding I’d drawn this lesson out long enough. “It’s a glass of water. You haven’t taken your pill yet.” I plucked the container out of my pocket, where I’d hastily stashed it while I was in the kitchen, and popped the lid open. I set the pill down next to the glass, then simply waited.
My master glared at me. Then he dipped his head, just slightly ashamed of himself. And then he picked up the pill and washed it down with a few quick swallows of water. “Why did you do that?” he asked, when he was finished.
In hindsight, I could come up with a dozen different reasons, and if I’d been more concerned about being punished for mymisbehaviour, I might have spun a more compelling story – something about him needing to realise by himself that he didn’t want to drink, rather than being forced not to. But the truth was far simpler. “I was hoping I could jolt you out of your bad mood.”
He peered up at me, eyes narrowed, as if trying to understand a particularly complex mathematical problem. “This is not the way Aiden says dimari are supposed to behave.”
That came as a shock. It wasn’t a reprimand, but at the same time, I felt a rush of shame. I was not a good dimari. I had been sold for a particularly low price. And a year of isolation and regret hadn’t changed that a bit.
“No, sir,” I said in the end, because what else was I supposed to say? Aiden said this was the correct way to look after my master. But whether or not my master himself approved remained to be seen. Then again, it was hard to believe that he was ever going to thank me for pushing him around and finding covert ways to scold him. Not knowing what else to do, I finished clearing away the breakfast things.
Ten minutes later, I arrived back in the living room with a pair of socks in one hand and a pair of sunglasses in the other. “It’s a nice day for a walk,” I told my master, holding out the two items. He was still sitting at the table, staring at a little collection of puzzle pieces, no doubt convinced that they fit together somehow.
“Jesus Christ, you don’t give up, do you?” he said. But even as the words were leaving his mouth, he was reaching for the pair of socks. He bent over to shuffle the first one onto his foot. “Not a long walk, though,” he said, and there was enough real apprehension in his voice that I took notice. “It’s not… I’m really not…”
“Just down to the park and back,” I said, my tone gentler now. “That’s all.”
He nodded and finished putting on his socks and shoes.
It only took five minutes to walk to the edge of the park, and as we arrived, I slowed. I wanted to keep going, to look at the pond, to see some of the other people who were out and about, and maybe exchange a cheery ‘Good morning!’ with a few of them. After a year of not speaking to anyone, I would take whatever opportunities I could get. But I knew there was a fine line between prompting my master to make small improvements to his life, versus pushing him too hard and ending up doing more damage. I’d told him we only needed to go to the park and back, and given how the morning had started, getting this far seemed like an achievement already.
Apprehensively, I asked, “Do you want to go back?”