Page 8 of Dax: Gratefully Bonded (Rogue Bonds #2)
Dax
T he 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.”
He sighed and chewed on his lip for a moment, then he squared his shoulders and continued. “That puts you in a very difficult position. Because I know that dimari are trained to obey their masters. And I understand that you can’t order him around or force him to do anything he doesn’t want to do.”
I thought that was rather stating the obvious, but I refrained from saying so. But I also understood the subtext of what Aiden was saying. My master needed to do certain things, for the sake of his health, and somehow, it was going to be my job to convince him to do them. I considered the idea for a long moment, then shook my head. “I don’t know how to do that,” I said with a frown. “Every time I ask him if he wants me to do something, he says no. And if people pressure him to do things, he gets angry. On the ship when we first met, he was bleeding, but he yelled at me when I tried to help him. There was a lady there who had to yell at him back, and she got very angry, and then he finally decided to let her help. I can’t do that sort of thing. It’s not allowed.”
“Of course not,” Kade said, which didn’t make me feel any better. They’d given me a task to do, and I’d already failed at it. “Like Aiden said, you can’t tell him what to do. But part of the role of a domestic companion is to offer suggestions. To find interesting social events that their master might enjoy. To guide their master towards appropriate fashion choices. None of it is ever delivered as an order, but a clever dimari can have a strong influence over their master’s choices.
“What you need to do is figure out how to do the same thing with Zeke’s day to day life. Aiden has given him a list of things that he’s expected to do, to begin recovering from his alcoholism. We’ll give you a copy of the list, but one of those things is to go for a walk every day. And to be clear, the length of the walk is not important. Just around the block is fine to begin with. It’s simply about getting him to get dressed and go outside, even if it’s only for five minutes. But if he’s inclined to go further, there’s a park down the road where you could both take some bread and feed the givarids. Or you could walk to the shopping centre and get some lunch together.
“So we need you to first of all make the assumption that you’re going with him, whenever he goes for a walk. If he flatly tells you not to, then fair enough, you can’t disobey a direct order. But if he doesn’t forbid you, then go with him. But aside from that, you need to come up with a variety of ways to suggest it’s time to go for a walk, without giving him a direct order.”
I had not been trained as a domestic companion. My trainers had considered it at one point. They’d told me I was too intelligent to be merely a domestic servant. But all of their attempts to curb my attitude had ultimately failed, leaving me relegated to a position of mundane repetition and quiet frustration. In my own mind, my unique way of doing things was because I could see better ways to achieve results, or see the undesirable consequences of certain decisions that my master might make, and I was attempting to be extra helpful by leading them towards wiser choices.
In my trainer’s eyes, I had been disobedient, belligerent, a smartass.
And so now, I was thoroughly confused. “You want me to manipulate my master into doing the things that are good for him?”
Standing by the wall, Kade frowned in consternation. He would certainly see the negative implications of that course of action. But Aiden merely nodded. “Manipulate might be a strong word for it,” he said, too casually for my peace of mind. “But Zeke needs firm guidance. And from what he’s said about you, it seems you might have just the right personality to give it to him.”
I could only imagine what my master had said about me. A scathing report of stubbornness, insolence and wilfully headstrong behaviour. He’d told me a dozen or more times not to do the dishes, and yet I persisted in washing them – albeit that I waited until he wasn’t around. The thing was, he hadn’t told me to never do the dishes. He routinely just said something to the effect of, ‘There’s no need to do that now’. Which meant he technically wasn’t forbidding me from doing it later – whenever ‘later’ happened to be. He’d done the same thing with the laundry, or the vacuuming, and I’d grown accustomed to working around his vague disapproval. At our very first meeting, I’d injected him with an anti-venom, despite receiving nothing at all like permission from him to do so, because he’d been likely to die without it. And I’d gotten away with it on the basis that he hadn’t expressly told me not to help him. He’d only told me to help his crewmates first.
If my trainers had questioned me, I would have said I’d done it because I couldn’t bear for my master to die. But I’d actually done it because I’d recognised that dying through sheer stubbornness was stupid, and I’d been too annoyed to let him do that.
“Like I said, it’s going to be a challenge,” Aiden said, his tone softening as he saw my dejection. “But I’m sure you can come up with a few polite ways to make suggestions.”
I may as well try, I decided. It wasn’t likely that doing so could make my current situation worse. My master already hated me, I’d failed a good part of my training, and I’d proven myself incapable of changing my ways, despite a whole year of my master’s reprimands.
Had something gone wrong with my programming? I wondered suddenly. Surely no other dimari has such a problem with following orders. Was my brain just defective, in such a way as to not respond to my trainers’ neuro-engineering machinery? Why was I like this?
“It looks like a lovely afternoon for a walk?” I ventured, in response to Aiden’s expectant expression, not sure that such a sideways approach would have much of an impact on my master. “Or maybe… Rain is predicted for this afternoon, so it would be a good idea to walk this morning, before it clouds over.” That was a bit better. It provided an imperative to go sooner, rather than later. Or, even more forcefully, “Walking is an important activity for your physical and mental health.”
That one sent a jolt of adrenaline through me… followed by a wave of shame. It was a very firm statement, walking an extremely fine line between suggestion and insolence. But, I reasoned, at its root, it was nothing more than a medical fact. Exercise was, in fact, important for both physical and mental health.
Aiden smiled. “Any of those could work, depending on how Zeke responds. You’ll probably have to try a few different options to narrow down what works. What about if you were running out of food in the kitchen?”
I thought for a moment, trying to come up with polite ways to… Oh goodness… It would be polite ways to tell my master that he was failing at looking after the household. My brain glitched for a moment, before jumping right over the problem to come up with an entirely different solution. Knowing what I now knew about my master, and about what Aiden expected of me, I said, “I would put together a shopping list and then ask him to approve it before I ordered it. The implication there would be that we necessarily were going to buy something, and the uncertainty was only surrounding what we buy, not whether we buy it in the first place.” I glanced uncertainly at Kade. Was I overstepping my role? Would a domestic companion get away with that sort of audacity?
But a small smile graced the other dimari’s lips, and Aiden was grinning outright. “Excellent,” he said, warmth shining in his eyes. “I’m starting to think that you and he are something of a perfect match.”
But then he sobered. “I’m not kidding when I say it’s going to be tough,” he cautioned me. “I’ve given Zeke a firm talking to about not being a dick to you, but he’s going to be under a lot of stress over the next few weeks and I can’t guarantee his moods aren’t going to get the better of him. So here’s your comm,” he said, handing it to me. I took it and dutifully strapped it to my wrist. “And here’s my contact details…” He tapped a few buttons on his own comm, and a moment later, mine beeped. “If you have any questions, or if you need help when things are going badly, you can contact me at any time. I mean that. Any time of day or night, any day of the week. It’s going to be a long, slow battle dragging Zeke out of the hole he’s in, and I’m prepared to be there when he needs it. And we’ll be coming back in a couple of days to check up on how things are going. We’ll be making regular visits for a couple of weeks, at least, so don’t worry about being left on your own.”
I nodded, resolving to keep the comm with me all through my waking hours. I’d seen enough already to know that my master could be unpredictable, and given Aiden’s description of PTSD, I thought it likely that I might need backup at short notice, depending on exactly what he got it into his head to try and do.
“Thank you,” I said, feeling that the words were probably inadequate. I was still confused about a lot of things, and wary of disappointing my master again, but this new approach was something different, at least. And given how things had been going for the past year, doing the same things over and over again was doomed to fail. So different had to be good, right?