After Phase II and after inventrix‘ Chain of Command
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The Bishop is Mike. I’m not sure why.

Mike would laugh at him.

Mike probably was laughing at him, or, at least, he would be if any of Luke’s letters got through. Cloverleaf claimed to have a postal system, but you never knew, and Luke was old enough to have outlived several other mail delivery set-ups.

Some part of him thought, perhaps, that all the wiggle room in time when Cya sent him on errands was some sort of trap. She was the unapologetic dictator of an ever-expanding Empire; it wouldn’t be beyond her to have his mail intercepted so she could read it.

He could have just asked permission. Some part of him rebelled against the idea. He was a prisoner of war. He’d made a mistake… and been rewarded and punished in the same swoop. That’s what this was. Punishment for attacking Leo, a cover for his freedom from his oaths to Regine. And it seemed Cya had decided it would also be instructional.

It suited his impressions of her that she multi-tasked even this.

He touched his left wing-claw thoughtfully. The jewelry had been… Interesting. Wearing it in public had been strange, this weird combination of shame and pride — for the thirty seconds it had lasted.

Leo had been far less ambiguous in his reactions, returning him to sender like…

like…

shit

Like Luke’d sent students back to their Keepers when they’d shown up for PE with a collar too punitive, too difficult to actually do PE in, or with jewelry locked on.

Shit. Well, if he ever actually went back to teaching, he could make some changes there. Regine had hobbled him way too much.

Mike would laugh at him… and then probably have a list. Mike’d had a list quite a few times over the last couple decades.

Mike was going to spend a lot of time laughing at him. Luke shifted his wings and tried not to feel too stupid or too angry about that.

Or about the rest.

There had been the mess with the wing-jewelry. Luke hadn’t exactly liked the jewelry, but when he looked at the shame and pride – or, rather, when he thought about Mike laughing at him about it – what he came up with is Cya is saying I’m hers. Like the collar. But… more.

He should have anticipated it would cause problems. He had been more tied up in how he thought about it, and the disjointed feelings of having been bound and touched and somehow ending up feeling like he’d done something more intimate than sex.

And then Leo had sent him back.

Luke’s wings twitched again. That had been… humiliating. The look on Cya’s face, that had been something else. She wasn’t angry, she wasn’t sad. She shut down. Luke had found very quickly that he didn’t like it when she shut down.

And she’d politely asked for General Leofric’s time at his earliest convenience.
Luke had winced, because the two of them were snipping at each other too politely, too remotely. This was going to go badly. It was going to drag on, to become something awful.

…And now Leo was wandering around with obvious bite marks on his neck and chest, and, from the way he was moving, quite a few more bruises and scrapes over the rest of him. He hid it well, but he’d gotten torn into last night and wasn’t bothering to heal it.

Or had been ordered not to heal it.

Cya had not been pleased when Luke had been returned to her. It certainly hadn’t been the first time she’d been displeased with her general.

“If you think I’m pissed at you, Luca, you might imagine how angry I am at Leo.”

Exactly how pissed was she this time?

Luke paced, because he didn’t have anything to do at the moment, and because if he looked at Leo again, he was going to explode. Mike wasn’t going to laugh at him. Mike was going to be rolling on the floor, doubled over with laughter. Guffawing. Chortling. They were going to have to make up new words to explain the laughter.

Did she send me here all decked out just to piss off her paramour? ‘Cause it certainly worked like that, and Cya has plans for everything. That’s what everyone kept telling him, at least.

It had been bad enough to think about being decked out because she wanted everyone to know he was her Hawk, to jess as she saw fit.

It was a hundred times worse if she’d just done it to piss of Leo. He wanted to punch something. He didn’t have anything to punch. He certainly couldn’t haul off and punch Leo. That had landed him here in the first place.

“If you think I’m pissed at you, Luca, you might imagine how angry I am at Leo.”

Leo might be moving like he was hiding bruises, but he wasn’t acting like he’d just been chastised. Then he turned in exactly the right way, and Luke could see the teeth marks delicately embedded in Leo’s earlobe.

Those weren’t marks of abuse.

He was an idiot.

She hadn’t been mad at Leo at all.

Luke flapped his wings once, twice, and took to the air in a cloud of dust.

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