Page 7 of Dax: Gratefully Bonded (Rogue Bonds #2)

Zeke

I unlocked the door to my house, leading our odd little procession inside. I was desperately hoping that Aiden had plenty more details on the ‘how to’ side of things. His overall plan was a bold one – get sober, deal with my trauma and give Dax something worth living for. But the how of all that was as elusive as it had ever been.

“Zeke,” Aiden said, as I closed the door behind us. “Kade and I need to speak to you privately. Could you please ask Dax to go somewhere where we won’t be overheard?”

My gaze immediately shot to Dax. Aiden had thoroughly told me off earlier for not thinking before speaking in front of my dimari, and now he was basically pretending that Dax couldn’t hear him? That being told to fuck off and leave us alone wasn’t going to dump a whole new pile of rejection on him?

“Why don’t you tell him yourself?” I shot back.

“Because you’re his master,” Aiden replied without blinking. “Firstly, you need to learn to give him orders, and secondly, he’ll listen to you. He’s got no reason to listen to me.”

“I’m not going to start ordering him around like a fucking slave,” I snapped at him.

Aiden merely sighed. “There are a lot of things I need to explain to you that Dax will not understand. So for his own benefit, we need some privacy for the next half an hour or so. And you are his master,” he repeated, emphasising the words a little more firmly. “He looks to you for direction. And this is your house. You would know far better than me where a suitable place for him to go would be.”

“You’re talking about him like he’s not even there!”

“And I assure you, he’s not the slightest bit offended by that.”

I wanted to argue. I wanted to rage at Aiden for being an egotistical bastard, since he seemed to have wholeheartedly embraced the mantle of ‘Master’, ordering not only Kade around, but my dimari as well. But as I glared at him, I couldn’t help but notice the stark difference between our two dimari. Kade; alert and attentive, as if there was nothing at all unpleasant about this situation, and Dax; hunched over to make himself as small as possible, glancing from me to Aiden in growing apprehension. Kade trusted Aiden. And he was visibly looking to him for direction, just like Aiden had said. Every few seconds, Kade glanced sideways at his master, and I was struck by the mental image of a well-trained golden retriever, glancing at their owner in anticipation of receiving their next instruction. Even in my own head, it was a grossly derogatory idea… and yet, which one of them was slowly drowning in despair? I could rail at Aiden as much as I liked, but the evidence pointed to the idea that his way of doing things created a far more positive result than mine.

I sighed. “Dax, could you please go and sit outside in the courtyard?” I said, as gently as possible. I was trying to make it a request, not an order. “You can put up the umbrella, if you’d like some shade.”

“Yes, Master,” Dax said, looking relieved as he darted out of the room. I heard the back door open and shut a moment later.

I gritted my teeth and shook my head. “You know what? I have no idea if he’s going to put the umbrella up or not. I keep telling him he’s allowed to do stuff, but he never does any of it.”

Aiden nodded, not looking the least bit surprised. “We’re going to talk about that,” he said. He eyed the sofa. “Shall we sit down? Is here okay? It’s important that Dax isn’t going to overhear anything we say.”

“Why?” I asked.

To my surprise, it was Kade who answered, keeping his voice low. “Because the average dimari has absolutely no understanding of how they came to be on Rendol 4, why they’re here, or what their relationship with their master actually is. And if you tell him the truth on any of that, he’s extremely likely to kill himself. I spent a good half an hour at the café telling him about fifteen different lies about who he is and what you expect of him. You absolutely cannot tell him that you didn’t want him in the first place or that you just happened to find him, instead of deliberately buying him.”

“You haven’t done that, have you?” Aiden interrupted apprehensively. “Have you told him that he bonded with you by accident?”

“No,” I said, fairly sure that it wasn’t something I’d ever said to him. But then I eyed Kade suspiciously. “But you clearly know that…” I hesitated. Did he know why he was here? Would I inadvertently break him if I told him?

“I know that Aiden found me by accident,” Kade confirmed, with a small smile. “And I’m still very happy to be his dimari. But the finding out was rather traumatic. I know that I’m his slave. I also know that slavery is illegal in Alliance space. Which is something else you should never tell Dax. He may find out himself one day, by watching the news channels, but my hope is that by that point, he’ll have a strong enough bond with you to weather the shock of it. Right now, that kind of information would just destroy him.”

Belatedly, I gestured to the sofa. “Well, we can talk here,” I said, taking a seat in the armchair off to the side. “So long as you don’t shout, he’s not going to hear us.”

Aiden took a seat, and Kade sat down next to him, not quite so close that they were touching, but closer than mere friends or co-workers would sit.

“Let’s start at the beginning,” Aiden said. “Having been brought up in the Alliance, you and I have a fundamental disgust with any form of slavery. That’s the basic kind of morality we’re taught in first grade; don’t murder people, don’t torture small animals, don’t buy slaves. So it’s very easy to look at the dimari and object to their very existence. We want to liberate them. We want to rehabilitate them. We want to instil in them a fully functional sense of our own autonomy and free will.

“The thing that we all fail to understand is that dimari are trained, from the moment they learn how to talk, to view themselves through the lens of their master’s approval. This isn’t just behaviour training and propaganda. The Eumadians use neuro-engineering technology to change the way a dimari’s brain functions. That’s how they get them to bond to their masters.”

“Yeah, I’ve read a little bit about that,” I said, glancing apprehensively at Kade. He’d been through the same torturous process that Dax had. “Sounds fucking awful.”

“It’s not an unpleasant process,” Kade said, with a startling lack of concern. “We’re given a great many rewards for completing our training. And the neuro-engineering machines do not hurt. I’m not justifying the intentions of the Eumadians,” he added, at my aghast expression. “I’m merely saying that the process they use does not cause us any particular pain.”

“It’s all positive reinforcement and matching their training to their interests,” Aiden explained. “But the end result is that they’re left with no real sense of self.”

“A dimari does not want things in the same way that their masters want things,” Kade continued, and I was again baffled to see him almost interrupting his master like that. But this was certainly not the first time they’d been through this explanation with a dimari owner, so maybe they’d developed something of a rhythm with each other. “My greatest desire is to make my master happy. And to be without a master is the most terrifying thing a dimari could ever experience. Which clashes terribly with Alliance culture. You see yourselves as doing a good deed by telling us to be our own masters, by letting us make our own decisions. What you are actually doing is removing all sense of our identities and our purpose, leaving the dimari in question feeling completely worthless.

“A dimari fundamentally needs to be told what to do. He needs you to tell him if he’s done it well. If he hasn’t, he needs you to tell him how to improve his performance. A lot of humans say they don’t know what their dimari wants. But he wants what you want. The problem is that if you never tell him what you want, all he becomes is an empty shell.”

“So this is the first part of the magical handbook,” Aiden picked up the thread again. “And it’s a hard pill to swallow. We automatically jump to the conclusion that by ordering our dimari around, we’re exploiting them, or being selfish or lazy. What giving them orders actually does is gives them a sense of purpose.”

I most certainly wasn’t comfortable with what Aiden was saying. But I took the time to think back over the past year, and the number of times I’d told Dax not to do the dishes, or not to do the laundry, and how each and every time, he’d looked a little more dejected. Maybe Aiden had a point… “So telling Dax not to clean the house would have been like telling me I couldn’t fly a ship anymore?” I hazarded a guess. The analogy didn’t quite fit anymore, now that I was basically retired, but before Ixralia, if someone had grounded me indefinitely, I’d have been heartbroken.

“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 you need 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.”