Page 45 of Dax: Gratefully Bonded
We hadn’t gone for a walk today, and I briefly considered suggesting it… then just as rapidly dismissed the idea. Our excursion yesterday had been very stressful for my master, and today’s session likely more so, so I didn’t think it unreasonable to take one day off. I knew we couldn’t make a habit of coming up with excuses not to go, but at the same time, pushing my master too hard carried the risk of doing more harm than good.
I turned to face my master as he came in the back door, ready and willing to spring into action for whatever task he had for me.
But instead of addressing me, he simply set his cup by the sink, then put a hand on my shoulder. He squeezed gently, then went into the living room.
I waited, expecting him to turn the wall screen on. That was his old habit whenever he was feeling morose; come in from the pub and stare at the screen until he passed out drunk.
A minute passed… and then another… but there was no sound from the screen. I peered around the corner, wondering if he was working on his puzzle, but he wasn’t sitting at the dining table either. Instead, he was sitting on the sofa, a page of information projected in a holographic image above his comm. I wouldn’t have been able to read the script, but I was too far away to even make out the images, and I forcefully shoved my curiosity aside. If he was back onto researching a new hobby, or looking up some other useful information, then that was probably a good thing. He wasn’t drinking, he wasn’t ranting about how awful some aspect of life was, and he wasn’t trying to distract himself from reality. All in all, I considered, this seemed to be an improvement.
My master said nothing else to me until it was dinnertime. “You’re doing well with the cooking,” he said, after tasting the first bite of the pie. “Kade helped you make this?” He’d been aware that Kade was coming over, though he hadn’t actually seen the man while he was here.
“Yes, sir,” I admitted. “He says that humans like their vegetables to be firmer than many of the species I was taught to cook for. I was overcooking them before.” I said it not as an admission of failure, but simply as something to make conversation. I wanted to get him talking, though I didn’t really know where to start. I wanted to ask him what he’d been reading that afternoon, but didn’t think I had the right to pry into his private activities. I wanted to ask how he was feeling, but didn’twant to upset him, if he was on edge from the therapy session. He nodded, but didn’t reply.
“Do you have any particular plans for tomorrow?” I asked him, another attempt at benign conversation.
“No. Yeah. Maybe. I don’t know,” he said, poking at the food on his plate. “I thought I might go over to the military base. Have a chat to Henderson or some of the guys I used to work with. Not for anything specific, just to see what’s going on.”
“I thought you wanted to avoid the military,” I said cautiously. He hadn’t said a great deal about his former job over the past year, but none of the little he had said had been positive.
“Yeah. No. Sometimes. I just… I don’t know.” He didn’t seem to have anything else to say, so I let the topic drop.
The rest of the evening passed just as awkwardly. I cleaned up the kitchen after dinner, then went to sit on the sofa near my master. He didn’t ask me to curl up next to him, like he had before, so I kept to my own end, perusing a few recipes I’d found while my master continued reading whatever he’d been looking at earlier in the day. But I was acutely aware of the fact that he was spending as much time staring into space as he was reading, and I once again had to wonder what this new psychologist had said to him.
Finally, nine o’clock rolled around, and my master yawned, stretched, and stood up. “Time for bed,” he muttered. It wasn’t an order, but I stood up anyway. I’d been trained to follow my master’s schedule, and even if I hadn’t been, tonight, I wanted to keep an eye on him.
We both brushed our teeth, and having received no other instructions from my master, I headed for my bedroom. An inquisitive noise from him stopped me in my doorway.
He was standing in his own doorway, looking uncertain, while one hand squeezed the door frame a little harder than necessary. “Dax?”
“Yes, sir?” I said, heart thrumming in my chest. Was he actually going to ask me to…?
“Do you want to…” He stopped, as he so often did in the middle of a sentence, seeming to rethink what he was going to say. “Come and sleep in my bed tonight,” he said finally, and I felt my shoulders relax in relief. I’d suspected that was what he’d been going to ask, but also afraid he was going to change his mind before he got the words out.
“Yes, sir,” I said, a smile tugging at my lips. I followed him into his bedroom and stripped out of my clothes. I usually slept in only my boxer shorts, and after this morning, I didn’t think he’d mind sleeping next to me if I wasn’t wearing anything else.
Sure enough, he stripped off himself and lay down in just his underwear. I turned off the light and climbed in beside him, eagerly snuggling up against him when he put his arm around my shoulder. I draped my arm across his waist and closed my eyes, paying close attention to his breathing as I waited for him to fall asleep.
Half an hour later, my master was still lying there, as stiff as a board, his breathing shallow and uneven.
“Sir?” I dared to ask, lifting my head a little. “Are you well?”
For a long moment, he didn’t reply. Then his arm tightened around my shoulder, his fingers threading through my hair. “She asked me…” He stopped, and I waited. When he didn’t continue, I gently stroked a line up and down his chest. “She asked me what I wanted to do with the rest of my life,” he said eventually. “I’m thirty-two. By all reasonable measures, I’ve got another seventy years to live. It’s a long time to just be filling in the empty afternoons.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. Aiden had been right – my master needed a hobby – but given his former career in the military, perhaps that wouldn’t be enough to keep him occupied. He couldn’t fly ships anymore – neither his mind nor his bodywould put up with the strain – but carving wooden figurines or taking dance lessons was not likely to provide enough purpose to keep him satisfied. Just like he’d described it; it was filling in time, rather than creating something useful.
“What did you tell her?” I asked. About a thousand suggestions instantly appeared in my mind, but I shut them all down. For all that I’d frequently got into trouble for voicing my opinions, I also understood when they were not helpful. No doubt my master had done a great deal of thinking on the topic himself, factoring in a thousand nuances to his situation that I was currently unaware of.
“I said I’d have to think about it,” he mumbled. “Then she said…” He trailed off again. He muttered a couple of curses, then pulled away from me. I experienced a moment’s panic, convinced he was about to kick me out of his bed for being a nuisance. But instead, he switched on the bedside lamp and sat up, running his fingers through his hair. “Aiden said I should find a hobby. And I’ve been twisting myself in knots trying to figure out what I wanted to do. None of the ideas I came up with sounded terribly appealing. But Cas – that’s the psychologist,” he explained. “She said that by my age, I already know what I like or don’t like. Which is not to say I can’t try something new, but it’s not like being a teenager and trying to figure out what career you want. I’m not starting from a blank slate, trying to brainstorm ideas. I’ve been enough places and seen enough different jobs to know what I enjoy doing. She said it’s more about recognising the barriers I’m putting in my own way.”
I listened intently, but I had little advice to offer. Dimari didn’t get any kind of choice about what career we wanted to have. I’d been told that I was going to be a domestic servant, and that was that.
“I grew up wanting to be a pilot,” my master went on. “I wanted to fly ships. And I did, for many years, and then I gotpromoted to Captain, and started running missions with a team under me, and it was… Up until a year ago, it was great. But I can’t do that anymore. I can’t fly and I can’t deal with the stress of going off-world. But…”
I tilted my head, hoping he would continue. No doubt he’d been tossing this idea around in his head all afternoon, though by the sounds of it, he hadn’t yet arrived at any firm conclusions.
“I can’t fly ships anymore, but that’s all I ever wanted to do. So what do you do when the one thing you were born to do doesn’t exist anymore?”
I sagged a little, having no more of an answer to that question than he did. I’d been trained my whole life to serve my master, and had suffered through a year of believing I was a failure at it. I was getting a second chance now, but given what my master had been through, a second chance for him wasn’t likely to come anything like so easily.