Page 5 of Dax: Gratefully Bonded
“I’m Til,” she said with a smile. She seemed to be about to say something else… but apparently, she thought better of it. “You can come and order at the counter, or you can put it through via your comm. Just scan the sticker on the corner of the table.”
“Thank you,” I said, feeling my face heat. She was either incredibly nice, or incredibly discreet. Either way, I appreciatedthe fact that she hadn’t made any inappropriate comments in front of Aiden.
We wove our way through the tables to the corner, but before he sat down, Aiden stopped and tugged on Kade’s arm. “Take Dax and go find a table over there,” he said, gesturing to the far side of the room. “Order a decent meal for him and a drink for yourself. And then run him through the basics of what we’re doing here. I need to talk to Zeke for a bit.”
Kade said an amiable, “Yes, sir,” looking entirely unsurprised by Aiden’s commands, and not the least bit put out about being ordered around. He steered Dax gently away and the pair of them sat down at a table that was far enough away to be out of earshot, assuming we kept our voices down.
“That’s a fairly vague command for a dimari,” I observed. “Does Kade not need to be told anything more specific than that? Dax is very willing to follow instructions, but incredibly bad at making decisions. If I put something in front of him and tell him to eat it, he will, but if I ask him what he wants to eat, he never knows what to say.”
“And that’s one of the things we’re going to talk about,” Aiden said, unfazed by my confusion. “But first, you need some food and I need some coffee.” He activated his comm and scanned the sticker on the table, then gave the menu a cursory glance. “I’m ordering you a bowl of yoghurt and fruit and some scrambled eggs on toast. God knows what you’ve been eating lately, but I’m guessing you’re in dire need of protein and vitamins. Are you allergic to anything?”
“No,” I said, because I wasn’t, and let’s face it, the breakfast he’d chosen for me actually sounded pretty good. “Do I get some coffee as well?”
He smiled. “Yes, you do.” Well, at least I hadn’t pissed him off too much already. But then he added, “You’re going to need it,” and my assessment of the morning dimmed.
He placed the order, then folded his arms on the table in front of him. “Let’s start at the beginning. I meant it when I said I owed you an apology. And before you go getting up in arms about it, I’m not going to force you to talk about it,” he added, forestalling the objection that was already on my tongue. “I simply want to say that I understand why you’re in the state you’re in, and I was wrong to judge you for it.”
He was trying to apologise, I reminded myself. But nonetheless, I felt a surge of rage at the reminder of where I was – philosophically speaking – and how I’d got here. “You don’t know fuck about my situation,” I snarled at him. “You’ve got no fucking clue what I went through.”
Aiden nodded, surprisingly calm in the face of my anger. “In terms of first-hand experience, no, I don’t,” he agreed. “But what I do have is a wealth of experience at seeing the long-term effects of PTSD on thoroughly capable soldiers, and I spent the vast majority of yesterday afternoon reading everything I could find in the Alliance Military library about the Ixralian wormhole. I’m going to be having nightmares for a week, and that’s just fromreadingabout it. But for what it’s worth, the Alliance has now posted warning buoys around the wormhole, to deter anyone else from traveling through it.”
“About fucking time,” I said, feeling my lower lip quiver.
Aiden nodded, then ploughed right on. “I’m not here to talk about the wormhole. Since I’m sure you don’t want to talk about it anyway. I’m here to talk about Dax.”
“I can’t look after Dax,” I interrupted him. “I’m not an idiot. I am a drunk, I’ll admit that much. But I’m aware that Dax is miserable. I did some research after he first bonded with me. I didn’t have a clue what to do with him, but I wanted to learn. But what I found is that everyone on Rendol 4 says the same thing; their dimari are hopelessly depressed andnothingwe do seems to change that. And even if I wanted to do better for him, I canbarely look aftermyselfmost days. I try to make sure he has food to eat – I know the kitchen’s empty right now,” I cut off Aiden’s inevitable objection. “But I’ve set up a regular delivery service which covers all the basics, at least. I try to make sure he eats. When he first got here, I tried to talk to him, to find out what he wanted, what he liked to eat, what he liked to do. But he refused to indicateanykind of preference foranything. He doesn’t ask for things. He doesn’t watch the entertainment channels with me. I’ve given him a comm so he can read books, but he doesn’t read anything. I don’t want to use him as a fucking slave, making him clean the house and shit, but he doesn’t actually do anything else! What the fuck am I supposed to do with him?”
Before Aiden could answer, our coffee arrived, and I wasted some time stirring sugar into the cup while we waited for the server to finish wiping off a couple of nearby tables and retreat back to the kitchen.
When the silence stretched on a bit too long, I looked up from my cup and caught Aiden staring across the room at Kade. His dimari was talking to mine, a concerned look on his face, while Dax stared morosely at the table. I could scarcely imagine what they were talking about. Consoling each other about being sold into slavery, perhaps? Was Dax jealous that Kade had a master who was so much more together than I was?
“Do you know what the expected lifespan of a dimari is once they reach Alliance space?” Aiden asked me, his eyes still on Kade.
“No idea,” I said.
Aiden’s gaze drifted back to me. “One year,” he said flatly. “One fucking year. And then they’re all so fucking depressed they commit suicide. The longest any of them have survived is two years. And we currently have about a hundred of them on the planet who are marching swiftly towards that deadline. Is that what you want for Dax?”
“Of course it’s fucking not!” I snapped at him. “I want him to be happy. I just don’t have a fucking clue how to make that happen.”
“So let’s suppose for a moment that I could hand you a magical instruction manual of how to make a dimari happy. I mean a detailed list of tasks to give him, things to say to him, thingsnotto say to him, and a blow-by-blow explanation of his expectations of you as his master. If I gave you that, would you be willing to follow it?”
“Yes,” I answered without hesitation. “Watching him shrivel up and die in front of my eyes is… Seriously, Aiden, if he kills himself, I’m only going to be a day or two behind him. Right now, he is theonlyreason I still bother getting out of bed in the morning.”
Aiden nodded slowly. “In a weird kind of way, it’s reassuring to hear you say that. Not the bit about wanting to kill yourself, but the fact that he’s currently preventing you from doing it. That gives us something to work with.”
“That’s fascinating,” I drawled. “But the question is, do you actually have this magical instruction manual?”
“Yes, I do,” Aiden said, sounding perturbed, despite the confidence with which he made the declaration. He glanced over at Kade again. “I’ve had Kade for about six months. And he’s taught me an incredible amount about how dimari think and what they want. You could argue that I haven’t had him long enough to claim any definitive success – we’re well short of the one year mark where everyone else seems to fall off a cliff. But everyone I speak to about him agrees that he seems very happy. And we’ve worked with a dozen or so other master-dimari couples so far, and all of them have made significant improvement. The dimari are a lot happier, their masters are far less confused, and everyone’s learning to communicate with each other in ways that will go a long way towards resolving anyfuture problems. In your case, though, there is one significant catch.”
“Why am I not surprised?” I muttered. “What is it?”
Aiden looked me dead in the eye. “You’re going to have to get sober. And stay that way. And knowing what I do about PTSD, that means dealing with your shit from Ixralia.”
I felt all the blood in my veins turn to pure ice. He may as well have told me I had to go swimming with sharks while bearing a gaping leg wound. But he didn’t give me time to answer. Instead, he reached into his jacket and pulled out a bottle of pills, setting it on the table in front of me.
“The first thing that’s going to happen is you’re going to go into alcohol withdrawal. Take one tablet three times a day for two weeks, then twice a day for two weeks, then once a day for two weeks. By the time you’re done with that, your body should have adjusted to living without alcohol. Assuming you actually stop drinking the stuff.”
I picked up the bottle, scanning the label. It was a distraction to delay having to come up with an answer to his demand. Committing to laying off alcohol felt a lot like committing to rowing across the Advian Ocean. In a boat with a hole in the bottom. “Where did you get these?”