Work Text:
He sleeps after killing Falcone, then wakes, and waking is like crawling up through dirt.
No jettison, no weightlessness, just a pain behind his eyes. He blinks at the close grey walls.
"Muse." Dorr's voice, light, from someplace to Jos' left. Just letting him know he's there, probably. So Jos doesn't have to suffer the indignity of being unknowingly witnessed.
He pulls himself up to sitting. The blanket pools around his waist. He's never this groggy, but he never sleeps this long, either. Dorr's reading, legs propped up on his desk.
"You're still off shift," he says, turning a page, "if you wanna catch some more shuteye."
Jos runs a hand down his face. Bruises and burns wake up under his touch. Aki treated everything from the waist up, but she'd known what the medic on Turundrlar hadn't. No way to hide when they tossed him back in that cell, only days before: he'd been had. Stripped out and down. It still ached in places he couldn't reach. Twinged when he moved wrong.
It's a nice thought, Erret's benevolent, casually averted eyes, but Jos has been seen already.
There's also the possibility that he just doesn't want to look at Jos anymore. Maybe the goodwill's worn off. Maybe the disgusting feeling twining up and through him has its roots in the space between them.
Joss swings his legs off the mattress. Wets his throat with water from a canister at Dorr's bedside. Dorr throws him a glance but keeps on reading; the longer he does it, the more it feels like it's an act. Nothing's natural, cut loose from their definitions as they are: Jos isn't a jet anymore and Dorr's not his squad leader. Jos doesn't know why it bothers him, except with his head fuzzed from sleep all the place and peace Niko trained into him feel as insubstantial as salt.
Why now, he wonders. Now that he was as free as he was ever going to get.
"You don't look too hot, mano," Dorr says. "Sure you don't want more beauty sleep? I know the mattress is comfortable, I broke it in myself."
Jos looks him in the face. Even after all that rest, he's too exhausted to decode whatever Dorr's keeping under the surface.
"I'll go back to my quarters." He stands, starts toeing on his shoes.
"The hell you will." There's the slap of Dorr tossing his book aside. "You gotta know the situation ain't leveled out yet. Things are too fresh."
Jos turns back to Dorr. Dorr watches him like you'd watch an animal, wary and trying not to look it.
"On Falcone's ship," Jos hears himself say, and barely recognizes his voice. "When you found out I was a symp. Were you glad then, that he'd gotten me? That I'd been punished?"
Jos doesn't have to explain what he means by gotten. The indignity of it is still close, like a wet cloth over his mouth and nose. His shirt cut to the waist. His pants undone. Marched back in there like that.
"Why're you asking me this?" Dorr's voice is uncharacteristically serious. A little bit of anger in it too. "Fuck no, Jos. Yeah I might've vented you, given the chance, but fuck. No. Not that."
Jos shrugs, the human way. He needs to get back to himself. To lock it all into place. But he feels blank, ringingly blank. What do you assemble from blankness?
"Siddown, you're making me nervous."
Jos does, because it's as easy and as hard as anything else. His throat's still dry. His head still hurts.
"I shouldn't have let you leave that cage," Dorr says at length. His gaze is dark and steady. "Shouldn't have let you go with him. For the rest of my life I gotta live with that. You're one of mine. One of Mac's." He sees Dorr's hands flex in his peripherals; hears him laugh, humorlessly. "I shoulda killed him myself."
"No." There's a definitive snap to Jos' voice.
Dorr shakes his head. "I get it needed to be you, man. I do. I just wish you'd never seen his fucking face again in your life." His chair squeaks as he turns to face Jos. "He's over. Might even be ashes by now. You got him."
Jos takes another pull of water. The sentiment's nice, but he's not going to explain to Dorr that he's already spent almost a decade learning how to grow around what happened to him. Relegating it to the least visited parts of himself. And now, this. All of this again. Maybe in a minute, or an hour, or another ten years, it'll be small again, against everything else he has, and is.
With all his practice, it should be easier to imagine.
+
The overtures of peace make it feel like something's finally moving, and as glad as Jos is of that, he's equally happy to sink himself into the work entailed. It constitutes the new center of his life.
Mostly he spends his time translating: prepping before meetings with Niko and the Caste Master and debriefing afterward. Sometimes he's given additional material to transcribe for the next round of meetings. The Captain and his high-ranking father have called on him a time or two, which feels bizarre. Azarcon could've easily put a bolt through his head at one time and now instead they sit at a table discussing striviirc-na sensibilities.
Outside of this he has dinner with Niko, works out, and tries not to break his fist on anyone's mouths no matter how badly they earn it. It's almost as exhausting as being a jet. That's what he tells Evan, anyway, when he drops straightaway onto his bunk at the end of each day.
Full, functional shifts. After a few of them he hardly even aches during his stretches. His cells repair Falcone's touch in a process that requires nothing from him but time. The ongoing itch under his skin can be chalked up to healing.
There is a shift where Niko looks tired all through dinner beneath Turundrlar's warm lights. It's not in his posture or his manner but the creases around his eyes. They take tea afterward and Jos asks if he'd like to spar.
He reads faint surprise in the way Niko turns his head.
"You would like that, Jos-na?" Niko asks.
It stutters Jos. Does Niko not take him at face value? Then the thought creeps in, leaving a trail dirty footprints behind it: he had not thought you were ready.
He'd seen Jos, too, after Khan and not said a word about it. Jos doesn't know if it's better that his body told the story without him. Niko had touched Jos' hair as tenderly as a child's and put him to bed on his own pallet. It was true that the drives and smell of the ship did more than most words could hope to.
To know, and to think less of: surely Niko does not. But to think differently of—Jos knows from his own cruelty toward Evan that it is sometimes unavoidable.
Jos stands from the low table. "Yes," he says, only that, and leaves Niko to follow.
In the gymnasium they face one another with blunted training weapons. Short dual blades for them both. It's the dance it always is, one that's lengthened over the years as Jos grew more capable. Then it's something else. The tempo of their knives clacking, the thump of their bare feet on the mats upends the steady beat of Jos' pulse. Their pace quickens Jos' blood until it's a mad whirl even from the inside. Niko looks serious, frowning while sweat gathers at his hairline. Human after all.
Jos doesn't know why his body decides this is real, suddenly, but it is. It is terribly, mortally important that he succeed here. He slips past Niko's guard. It's good form to pull your blows but Jos is too quick for his own good. A slip, and the pommel of Jos' knife crashes against Niko's nose. Not as forcefully as it might've, if Niko was slower or if Jos was better.
The shock of blood pulls him up short. His heart thunders in his chest. "Niko," he says. "I'm— It was an accident. I'm sorry."
Niko's weapons hit the mat. He raises a hand to still Jos, pinching his nose with the other. A striv appears at Niko's elbow to hand him a cloth. She stares flatly at Jos, her wings rippling with faint disdain.
Jos scoops up Niko's abandoned knives and hastily reracks their weapons. Niko appears to wait for him at the door.
"I can take you to medical," Jos offers.
Niko shakes his head. It seems like the blood is slowing down. "It is not necessary."
Instead Jos follows him back to his quarters, where he hands over a new cloth and wrings out the used one in the basin. The rust of Niko's blood washes over his fingers, hardly diluted by the water for the quantity of it.
"I'm sorry," he says again, while Niko leans back against the bulkhead. Truly, he must be tired. He never wears it so plainly. Jos thinks of the wide, white room where Ash-dan was executed. It hasn't been so long. Not very long at all.
"It's alright, Jos-na." Niko's voice is soft. "I've had much worse." He checks that the flow is truly staunched then wipes ineffectually at his face. Jos brings him a damp cloth that he accepts with a low, grateful hum.
"Ritla," Jos says quietly, when Niko's face is clean.
Niko's gaze settles on him. "Do you think so?"
"What do you call this? You trained me better."
"A mistake is just that. I rather you make it with me." He gestures for Jos to sit, and Jos lowers himself stiffly to a cushion. "Jos-na," he says. "You will not always have to fight. That is the purpose of these talks."
"I'm ka’redan," Jos says.
Niko inclines his head to the point. "As you wish it," he says. "Even the ka'redan do not fight without cause."
Jos takes a conscious breath, out through his nose. Then another. "There is still cause. Peace isn't here yet."
Niko doesn't answer. Silence lays fallow between them. The itching, again. Jos wills it down. He traces the script high on the walls with his eyes. It's some time before Niko speaks again.
"When I took you off Chaos, I wanted to give you a place," he says, "and I wanted to give you the means to defend that place."
"You did." There's something young in his own voice that Jos despises.
"What we choose among what we are given are the things that stay."
There's a headache building up behind Jos' eyes. He wants a dark room, a locked door, stillness. I don't know why you're telling me this, he wants to say. "I want to serve," he says instead.
No longer a jet. Years removed from Aaian-na. Jos knows he hasn't truly considered peace, because then he'd have to consider himself within it. It's easier by far to believe they only have a single day, each day as it comes.
Niko's face is shaded. Meticulously clean of blood, but Jos can still imagine it there. He's never seen Niko injured before. They'd never served alongside one another long enough for that.
"I'd have died without what you gave me. We both know it," Jos says. "Don't regret me."
Niko takes one short, hardly audible breath. A sigh, if he were a standard human being. "S’yta-na," he says. A hand to his chest, like a pledge.
Jos turns it over on the walk back to Macedon. What we choose, among what we are given. Jos wouldn't choose this. Niko's blood on his hands.
Given, too, is a word that resounds with more grace that it really contains. He feels Falcone in him, and more acutely during these lapses in which Jos is inexplicably certain that he is about to lose something. When he'd struck his teacher, the man who saved him—wasn't that Falcone? Curling snake-like down his limbs, taking up all available space. Wearing him like a skin.
S’yta-na. First place of the heart. What was the word for one you kept but swore you didn't choose?
+
Jos opens the hatch to leave quarters and almost walks right into Evan.
"Hey," Evan says. "You live here or something?"
Jos skirts past him. "I was on my way to the gym."
"They doing the peace talks on the boxing mat now? That's a pretty good call, actually."
"Talks are on hold. Niko and D’antan o Anil are taking comms from Aaian-na."
Jos takes off down the hall. Evan closes the hatch to q and follows.
He's a little winded when he catches up. Jos moves fast and Evan chain smokes like he's getting paid for it. "Aw, and I wanted to see Cap get his ass handed to him by that striv." Evan peers into his face. "You wanna see it too. That was almost a smile. No worries, I won't rat you out."
"Hand-to-hand does seem like bad odds," Jos says, and Evan looks delighted, like Jos has given him a gift.
He saunters along at Jos' side. "Sword-to-sword, though? You think the Captain has a saber or something?"
"Bet the symp knows all about it." Ricci slips out of the wardroom they've just passed. "Cap's saber. And the symp captain's. Hell, he's had more COs inside him than most of us will ever serve."
Bucher steps out of Ricci's shadow. "Not that he won't eat from the trash." His gaze rakes over Evan.
Evan's posture goes rigid. "Keep moving," Jos says to him in an undertone.
If he made it into a fight every time someone had a nasty word for him the past week, he'd never get anything else done.
Jos can see the muscle in Evan's jaw working. He keeps walking. Jos shouldn't be glad of his ability to absorb more abuse, but self-preservation can look like a lot of things.
Their voices reach after them down the corridor. "I bet things haven't been the same since Falcone got his little symp whore under him again. It make problems for you, Ev? He tell you you're not big enough for him now?"
A furious red wash travels downward from Jos's skull to his feet. He has to pull hard on his own reins. Some people act as though they don't know how easy it is to die. He thinks of Falcone, surprised even at the very end. He thinks of Falcone—
Evan breaks from his side, streaking back down the hall. Fucking stupid. Jos sees him reaching for something at the small of his back, tucked into his waistband.
If he pulls that knife he's done for. The jets'll shoot him and be glad of the excuse. Even the captain won't defend it, an attack on his jets. The last piece of who Jos used to be will be left to rot among the stars.
Jos sprints after him. Catches him by the shoulders and throws him backward to the deck. The jets have their hackles up. Jos has come too close to the radius of their ill-will for them not to try and snap him up.
One part of him wants it closed down fast and definitively. It's a little too close to the part of him that thinks killing them would be the cleanest option.
He tries instead to be a good student. Only hurt as much as he means to, and tries to mean it within reason. Funny concept. He drives Bucher to the ground with two clean hits, one that snaps his head to the side and the other back. Ricci goes for him from behind; Jos flips him forward onto his back and his head bounces hard off the deck. A third and fourth body crowd toward him, probably drawn in by the noise, or else jets just have a special sense for blood. Jos knows them by sight, but not by name.
Evan calls out a warning. A hand whips toward Jos' face. He doesn't like their open palm, how all-encompassing it is, like they'd smother him with it if they could. He leans out of the way then breaks their wrist in one quick movement. He knows exactly how bad it hurts. He kicks their legs out from under them and pins their broken wrist beneath his heel as incentive to stay down. They have some colorful words to say about that.
The last body to face him has their hand hovering near their holster. Jos waits, unblinking, for them to make their decision.
"Do you know how well it ended," Jos asks, "for every other person who's shot me?"
Evan says his name. It doesn't sound like much to Jos just then. He feels cold and efficient, narrowed to immediate concerns.
"Musey," another voice snaps.
Hartman, striding forward with Dette on her heels. She looks between Jos and Evan and the supine bodies on the deck.
"Think better of it, Kipley," she spits at the jet with their hand resting now on their piece. "Musey, to quarters. Now. Take him with you." She up-nods at Evan, who's staring frigid murder at Kipley.
He pushes Evan ahead of him. It's a short walk back to quarters in which Evan keeps his mouth shut for once. The silence lasts only as long as it takes for the hatch to shut behind them.
"Don't do that again," Jos says. "Ever."
Evan sizes him up from his bunk, already shrouded in cigret smoke. "Do what, specifically? Just so I have mommy's rules clear."
A younger, freer Jos might've broken something. "Don't defend me, or whatever passes for defense from you."
Jos sees it hurt. Evan says, stiffly, "They don't get to talk about it like you wanted it."
"It doesn't matter to me."
"How's that lie working out for you?"
"What you just did was basically suicide, why don't we talk about that?"
"I knew what it was," Evan says coolly. "It woulda been worth it to shut their fucking mouths for once."
Jos slams his fist against the bulkhead. "Not to me, you idiot. You fucking moron. It's not enough, the number of people we've seen bleed out on a deck?"
"You know what I saw?" Evan's voice drops to a rasp. "Your face when Falcone brought you back. And I know you've never seen that. You don't look in mirrors."
He hears it doubled: Falcone's voice, telling him nearly the same thing. Poor transparent Joslyn. All his training in subterfuge and still everyone can see his bullseyes like they're painted on.
"You wanna take a swing at me? It looks like it." Evan meets his stare. Some kind of wretched challenge in his slate blue eyes. That and something worse. "I'd let you. Have one for free."
"Shove your masochism and your pity up your ass," he spits.
Evan gives a sudden croak of laughter. "You think I pity you?"
"You look at me like I'm a hurt kid."
He shakes his head, lighting a new cigret off the stump of the old one. "What's there to pity? Made yourself into a fuckin' assassin, and a soljet to boot. I know what that fucker did to you. I know it exactly. And me, the best thing I ever managed to do was finally whore myself out to the right ship. So no, Jos. That shit you call pity? Me saying I'd die for your stupid ass? They got another word for it."
Jos rarely felt claustrophobic on ships, but he does now. Evan and his smoke: his diffuse, inescapable presence. Jos' skin refuses his glance like the ringing in his skull refuses any further cognition.
He turns to the hatch. Evan makes a noise in his throat, between a laugh and a scoff. Like this is exactly what he expected.
"Don't follow me," Jos says. "I mean it."
He catches Evan's mock salute, and the middle finger he follows up with.
+
He ends up in the recruit rec center, beneath the wide window where he and his fellow rookies would watch dogfights between Mac and ships unlucky enough to cross them. Kris and Iratxe, were they still alive, would be bored stupid by the view now: a slice of Turundrlar's hull and the Chaos station hanger above it, washed out by overhead lights that never switch off because the dock never empties.
He sits down cross-legged like he's going to meditate then doesn't even try. It takes a long time for the quiet to seep in. Alone and without a task he waits for signals to rise up from his body. It's like a dare, making himself hold still and face it.
There's nothing, he thinks.
But the idea isn't without a vague desperation. Like clawing at a stone, begging for entry. The want for something different in place of what is.
Evan said it wasn't pity, the thing that aligned him with Jos. The terrible possibility occurs to him that none of it is pity—not from Dorr, or Aki, or Captain Azarcon, or Niko. He himself doesn't have any pity. Maybe, he thinks, maybe he only sees it as pity because he doesn't have love within him, either. Not love the way it's supposed to be. He's got columns: already gone and in danger of leaving, and maybe he doesn't know who he wants to keep until they're on the way out.
His whole childhood his parents had been tender with him, but it only took a year to poison every touch he'd ever receive. By the time Niko rescued him it was already too late. It's been too late ever since, and now this is who Jos is. Useful, unloving; separate, by choice as much as by nature.
Falcone's dead. He thinks it then repeats it out loud in Ki'hade. He batters himself with the fact of it, trying to force it to change something inside him. The conclusion he eventually comes to is that Falcone is dead and yet, somehow, his death is not as final as the deaths of his mother and father and the boy they raised. He never thought killing Falcone would make it even; he just thought it would be more. Rinsed of words, he sits for a long time on the deck, and watches as the lights in the dock ring go on burning.