After Leash
Landing Page: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1202628.html

Luke tried to still his body, but his wings kept moving without consulting him first, twitching at the tips and unfolding just to tense up again. He closed his eyes and focused on his breathing, in-two-three-four, out-two-three four. He hadn’t been this agitated in…

“Damnit, Regine, those are my students out there. I have to go. I have to help them!” He’d just gotten a report of another one dead, and a whole team of former cy’Lucas was about to go into the most active war zone on the planet.

“No.” Regine’s voice was icy, beyond calm and into inhuman. “You need to protect Addergoole. That’s what you agreed to, and that is what you are going to do. Tempero Intinn Luka Hunting Hawk…” The Working had taken over his mind, and he’d lost both volition and memory of the scene.

He hadn’t remembered any of that until a week ago, not the time he’d actually been standing by the door with his weapons in hand. He’d remembered being angry — but he hadn’t remembered being stopped, turned around. She hadn’t wanted him to remember.

Cya’s hand was on his shoulder. “Hard getting used to the memories?” She sounded sympathetic. “It’s always tricky, when your brain’s been telling you the wrong thing.”

Luke bit back a comment that would’ve been both unkind and stupid. He was pretty sure that, yes, she did know.

“I can’t… no, the problem is, I can believe she did that. I can’t believe I let her.”

“People can be pretty blind when it comes to their crew. We’re supposed to be, I think, but sometimes I wonder if there isn’t some lost Law that helps with that.” Cya shook her head. “We may never know. The elders don’t exactly like talking to me. Not that it isn’t mutual.”

Luke cleared his throat. “I can’t imagine you’re fun for anyone to talk to that you don’t like.”

“Not really, no, not unless it behooves me to be fun for them to talk to for a while. How bad was the memory, this time?”

She’d pulled the conversation back on track so quickly that Luke thought he might have whiplash. He cleared his throat. “Not… not the worst one I have right now, but a bad one. During the war. Did you look at them, when you untangled them all?”

“Some of them. I’m holding off on some to let you choose what you want to do with them, because they’re…” she cleared her throat. “There are some places in your brain I don’t want to intrude without an invitation.”

That startled him. His wings twitched, and Cya’s lips twisted up. “You’re mine, yes, but you’re also an adult with lots of experience, and when this is done, I’d like you to still be our ally.”

“Still?” Regine had been ready to go to war with Cloverleaf.

“Still.” She nodded firmly. “You have not stopped being our ally. Leo holds you in immensely high regard, and I respect you far more than I respect most people.”

A warm feeling slide through him at the praise, no matter how slim it was. “I’m glad you consider me an ally,” he tried, “but Regine–“

“Is another matter entirely, yes. And right now, you are more than an ally.” She smiled crookedly at him. “So, I believe we were talking about being Kept.”

He shifted his weight backwards and met her eyes. “You were, yeah.”

She snorted, not missing that clarification. “You have to know the basics of being Kept; I can’t imagine even Regine would let you skip those. So you understand that you have to do what I say, that you feel badly if you disobey an order — and that that ‘bad feeling’ intensifies the more you try to ignore orders — and that you feel pleasure if I’m pleased with you. I won’t presume to instruct you on the basics of the Law where Kept are involved, or on the basics of ‘do what your Keeper says’. After all, you were my teacher for four years.”

He winced. He felt like she’d slapped him, even though there was nothing insulting at all in what she’d said. “I know the concepts,” he offered.

“Which is good. But you don’t know the reality yet, and you’re going to have to.”

He shifted position and looked at her as calmly as he could. “Am I in trouble?” The last time he could remember asking that, he’d been a teenager, insouciant and disobedient to his commander in the field. He’d done the right thing, that time. He envied that boy’s certainty.

“No.” The smile she gave him seemed to say that she knew exactly how relieved that made Luke feel. He folded his wings tightly and tried not to think too hard about it. “But that doesn’t mean this next part isn’t going to suck a bit anyway.”

Next: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1204140.html

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After Knocking Over Pieces
Landing Page: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1202628.html

Cya answered the door when he knocked, looking something between amused and annoyed. “You live here now,” she pointed out, in a tone of voice that, in someone else, Luke might think meant strained patience.

With Cya, he didn’t think he could assume even that. He shifted from foot to foot, hating himself for doing it but not able to stop the shamefaced way he wanted to grovel and hide at the same time.

“It’s your house,” he tried, aiming for a gruff voice.
She raised her eyebrows at him. His wings twitched and he shifted his stance to a broader, more stable one.

“It is,” he pointed out. “I don’t want to intrude.”

Cya grabbed his collar.

She moved slowly, so he had no excuse for not stopping her if he wanted to; she made her moves clear, so he could see what she was doing, and she almost exaggerated them, such that he felt a pull before she even had her fingers under the front of the metal around his neck. Luke held still and let her; the moment she had hold of his collar, he leaned into her pull a little bit.

In the back of his mind, he was mantling and scowling and growling. They weren’t in private; they were on the doorstep of the Mayor of Cloverleaf, on the front porch. Anyone could walk by and see them! He was pretty sure there were people walking by: neighbors, people who might see him again, people who might know her.

Everyone knew her, he reminded himself. His body was following the tug of the collar with a sort of self-determination that normally only happened in training routines and high-sky flying. He ought to be worried about that, probably. He might be worried about it later, probably when he was back at Leo’s, glaring at the map again.

Right now his cheeks were burning, his throat felt like it was on fire where she’d touched him, and he had no idea what to do with his hands.

“You belong to me.” Cya’s voice seemed to sear itself into his consciousness, even though she was telling him something he already knew.

He tried to protest that. “I was there, you know. I made the agreement with you.”

“I know. And yet I don’t think you’ve quite figured it out yet. You belong to me. My home is your home. My will is your will. Got it?”

He flapped angrily. “I’m not some wayward child!”

“No. But you are doing a very bad job of remembering Kept 101. And if I have to hammer it home by embarrassing you, I will, Hunting Hawk.”

Luke folded his wings tight as a surge of unhappiness washed over him. “I’m not an idiot,” he muttered.

“Not at all.” She tugged him into her living room and threw a broad throw pillow on the floor in front of her couch. “Kneel.” She released his collar. “We’re going to talk over some stuff.”

He flapped – and knelt. “This isn’t why I came back, to get yelled at.”

“It never is. Well, all right, once in a long while, someone actually likes being yelled at. Tell me, why did you come back?”

“Leo ordered me to.” The words were out before he could think about them. Luke glowered at her as she sat down in front of him. “Why did you do that?”

“Because I didn’t want you to have time to come up with a lie. All right. Thing one: This is your home.”
Luke’s wings twitched. “No. This is your home. I have a home.”

“Do you? A house that’s yours, a threshold to call your own?”

Luke started to say something, and then sighed. “Not anymore.” He hadn’t had a house that was his since before this girl had been conceived.

“Good. Step one, there we go. Step two…. this one’s going to take a while.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1203127.html. You can comment here or there.

This comes about 7 days after the last post, here: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1201555.html

Luke had been Kept for eight days, and he had spent 2 evenings with his Keeper. The rest of the time he had spent with Leo’s army, doing the job he’d been assigned to – or, at least, the way Leo had chosen to interpret the job Cya had given him.

The army was quite impressive, aside from the whole godhead issue, and there really was quite a bit Luke could do to help. He liked being out in the field again. He’d forgotten how much he enjoyed that: talking to troops, strategizing, scouting. He’d forgotten how much he’d enjoyed being a soldier.

Forgotten – or had the memories pulled out. He’d spend 2 evenings with his Keeper, and she’d spent both of them untangling memories locked up in his mind. Luke didn’t want to examine that too closely – or think too hard about why his crewmate, his friend had torn apart his memories and left him with a mind like Swiss cheese.

He glared at the map in front of him and indulged in an overblown wing-flap, knocking over a couple of the figures on the board.

“Why don’t you go home tonight?” Leo suggested cheerfully. “It’ll still be impossible in the morning.”

Luke shook his head. “I’m fine. If I just look at this a little bit longer, I’ll figure out what I’m missing.”

“No, you’re not fine.” Leo shook his head. “Come on, you know how this works.”

“How what works?” He made the effort to hold his wings in place and not flap, and very carefully put two of the pieces back upright. Pawns. Like Regine treated everyone; like Cya treated everyone.

“Being Kept. Go home, spend some time with your Keeper. You’re getting cranky.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” This time, Luke didn’t control his flap. The little pieces went tumbling again. “These people…!” Leo’s order was already pressing at him, though. He fought against it to pick up the poor little pawns. “I’m supposed to be helping you,” he tried instead, and hoped it didn’t sound too much like a plea.

Leo was looking at him oddly. He cleared his throat and finished straightening the pieces on the board. “Something with the dry creek bed, here, I think that’s the solution.”

“Go home, Luke. Be with your Keeper before you’re unbearable to be around.” Leo’s voice sounded a little too perky. Luke looked around; there was nobody else in the tent. What…

“I’m just irritated with the map,” he lied. He was irritated with Regine, and with memories that he didn’t know what to do with, and the nagging sensation that he was doing something awful.

“You know how this works, Luke.” There was the briefest hesitation. “Right?”

“Keepers.” Luke folded his wings. “You need some sort of proximity.” He’d always figured that had a lot to do with the Kept and not so much with the Keeping itself. “I haven’t done this before,” he added, defensive and not knowing why he was feeling that way.

“You haven’t… been Kept before? Cya’s your first Keeper?” Leo signaled someone outside the tent.

“Yeah?” Luke shrugged. “I never expected to be in this sort of situation.”

Leo’s teleporter came in. “Sir?”

“Take Luke here back to Red Doomsday, then return to your normal duties.” Leo wasn’t looking at Luke. “Go home, Luke.”

“Sir.” Luke bowed stiffly and let the teleporter take him.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1202208.html. You can comment here or there.

follows immediately after the last one, here: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1200388.html

Cya – his owner – his… she directed Luke upstairs, making cracks about Mike at his back. Luke held his wings as still as he could — the stairwell wasn’t that wide — as she teased him about Mike.

“I’m not…” He pressed his wings a little tighter to his back as he reached the top of the stairwell. “I didn’t…”

“You didn’t sign up to be Kept at all, so of course I don’t think you engineered this to get in my bed. That doesn’t mean you might not end up there.” She chuckled, and once again Luke struggled to keep his wings under control. “To the left, first door on your left. I think you’re going to find being Kept very educational, and I think that it might even be good for you.”

This time, he flapped. “You knew that already. The oaths. The twelve years.” The first door on his left opened into a spartan bedroom: giant bed, three wooden chests, two deep-silled windows with thick curtains. “You’ve already helped me out.”

“The situation helped you out. I’m talking about the actual Keeping.”

Luke turned slowly so he could look at her. She was serious, he thought, although he had a hard time getting a good read on her. “You think… being under the collar… will be good for me?”

“It often is. One, it narrows the scope of concerns. Two, it gives you a different set of feedbacks. Three, of course, it’s educational. And four, you can find yourself trying on different roles.” She gave him a somewhat sad-seeming smile. “I’ve done this a few times. I have some experience making sure I’m not the only one who gets something out of it.”

Luke narrowed his eyes at her. “And what, exactly, do you get out of it?”

He wasn’t expecting her to laugh; he certainly wasn’t expecting the delighted sound she made. “Do you really have to ask? Oh, you do, don’t you?” She giggled quietly. “I get a man in my bed, Hunting Hawk, and someone to help with the chores, help raise my children when I have them in the house, someone to help me run this city… this nation.”

“But… Leo?”

“You might have noticed I stopped taking Kept a few years ago.”

Luke glanced away. “Yes.” And now he didn’t know how to feel at all. Something like guilt was gnawing at him, which was ridiculous. She had maneuvered him into this Keeping. She had maneuvered all of them into this – might have even manipulated Leo into the godhead he was currently enjoying. So why did he feel like he was messing up one of her plans?

He stretched his wings cautiously. There was enough room in here for them; there was enough room in her bed for him to lay with his wings spread and leave room for her.

Somehow, he imagined she’d planned that, even if it hadn’t been his wings she’d been thinking of. She had to have Kept someone with wings before him…. right?

She sat down cross-legged at the head of her bed. “Lay down – take your time, get comfy – and put your head in my lap.”

Luke was moving before he really considered where he was going, and, despite her “take your time” order, was as comfortable as he was going to be in just a couple moments. His head was pillowed on her calf. It felt… intimate.

He shifted, spreading his wings out as much as he could. Part of him wanted to protest that he shouldn’t be in a bed with a student, but the rest of him shut that down as the stupidity it was. “What do you want me to do?”

It was a sign of how badly off-kilter she had him that he was just grateful his voice didn’t squeak.

Rearranging Pieces

“Close your eyes,” she ordered, and Luke closed his eyes. “Now, this is not an order, but try to relax, let your body sink into the bed. We’re safe here. Nobody’s going to attack us. Nobody is in trouble. You can let go for a few minutes.”

His shoulders tensed; he didn’t want to believe her. That was fine. Cya kept going. “Picture a place in your mind, a peaceful place. A clearing in the forest, with the sun filtering down through the pine trees. The air is crisp, but not uncomfortable. Just out of sight, you can hear a stream trickling.” She kept going, her voice mellow, the tone working as much good as the words, until his shoulders relaxed and the pinch in his forehead smoothed.

She didn’t normally need relaxation techniques when she was reading someone’s mind, but she didn’t normally have targets who were quite this tense, either.

When his breathing evened out, she slipped the Working in between phrases, fluffy clouds and meandering paths. She saw the scene in his mind, a place it looked like he’d been before. She saw him sitting on a big boulder, his wings spread, his face up to the sun and his eyes closed.

She had never seen him this peaceful. She murmured a Working to remember this, so that she could bring him back here again.

But she had work to do. First, she wanted to find the places Regine had touched. She didn’t doubt they were there; if she were Regine, and had an alarming habit of seeing people as pieces on a board, it was what she would do: ensure loyalty with oaths, and then enforce it with mind control.

Luke’s thoughts were a mess. He kept looping back to oaths he had made and been freed from: I’ll keep you safe. I’ll follow the school’s rules. He had an unfortunate habit, it seemed, of impetuous oaths… now where had she see that before? He kept poking at things she could not see — the way he’d feel guilty over something she said, or the way the orders made him feel like a puppet. The Bond was making him second-guess his thoughts and his feelings, and the thought kept popping up: should he look at this with a Working? Was that okay?

She left the chaos alone. He was going to have to adjust to being Kept eventually, and it would go better for him in the long run if he did that without her interference.

Not for the first or even the millionth time, Cya wished she could see emotions. But she wasn’t going to loop Leo in to help her with this, and Luke probably wasn’t ready to do the Working on himself for her.

Now she had to go deeper. His conscious mind showed her the way — paths he was avoiding, things he would consider and then forget before he thought too hard about them, things that seemed to hurt him when he thought about them.

His sons. She did not want to interfere if she didn’t have to with his children, so she brushed over that area of his memories gently. There were orders there from Regine, reminders of his oaths — and there was something twisted under lock and key.

She had seen Regine’s work on minds. The woman had a certain arrogance about her work. Cya brushed over that area and moved on to other parts of Luke’s memories for the moment.

The areas of locked-off memories were everywhere — anything having to do with the students, anything having to do with the Collapse, anything having to do with Mike, with Luke’s descendants, with a student he’d once looked at with affection.

Regine had been tying his brain up in knots for decades. Cya indulged in a little mental cursing and then went to work.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1201555.html. You can comment here or there.

A double-crack alternate universe in which Leo gets an army and then takes over the northwest.

Black Knight and White Queen from the 9th and White Knight from the 10th and
Red Queen from the 11th,
and Domination,
Captured Knight,
Captured Knight continued,
Chessboard,and several pieces by inventrix – /directly/ after Chessboard.

“It’s been happening for a while.” Cya ate slowly and made herself keep her eyes on Luke. She wasn’t going to justify herself to him, to Addergoole, so she shrugged a bit instead. “You’re not the only one to notice, but so far it’s been in the family.”

“You have a plan?”

She smiled. All these years, and he hadn’t really been paying attention. “I had a couple good ones, ’till you challenged him and got him all wound up. Now… my plan is to assign you to keep an eye on him while I consider the rest of my options.”

She had back-up plans, of course. She had back-ups for her back-ups. But if he hadn’t figured that out about her yet, he’d have to learn it the hard time.

His wings twitched. “You want me to keep an eye on him. Worship — being worshiped — it’s forbidden.”

“The interesting thing, though.” Cya set down her fork and leaned forward, making sure she had his attention. “It’s not against the Law.”

“The Council….”

“The Council has decided we’re too much effort to slap down, for the moment.” That had been a hard battle. Cya had no belief she could take down the strongest, stodgiest of the Shenera Endraae in a fair fight, but if it came down to it, she had absolutely no intention of fighting fair.

She noticed Luke was giving her a Look. “We take care of ourselves. Boom. Cloverleaf. We always have.”

She’d said something similar to him, early her second year of school. I can take care of myself. Boom can take care of itself.

She wondered if he remembered that. All he was showing right now — tight wings, tight expression — was worry. “This is serious.”

“Of course it is. I have an empire, Leo has an army, Addergoole wants to kill us, and the Council will probably come knocking pretty soon. It can’t really be anything but serious. But we’ll work it out.”

If anything, he tightened up. “Addergoole doesn’t…”

“I think I asked you not to lie to me.”

“Well…” his wings twitched. “Regine doesn’t want to kill you. Mike…” his voice caught. “Mike mostly wants to play in your playground.”

“And you?”

“Damnit!” His wings unfolded with a snap, and just as quickly folded back up as his expression twisted in sudden guilt. “I’ve been trying to keep you kids alive for decades now! But you won’t keep your heads down!”

She found she was giggling. “Welcome to my world, Hunting Hawk. I’ve been keeping Boom alive for decades. And we never, ever, stay down.”

—

Luke ate the rest of his dinner in silence. She thought he might be irritated at her. His wings were folded tight, his head was down, and he was stabbing his food.

She wasn’t going to apologize. He was going to have to get used to Boom being Boom, or this was going to be a very long decade-plus. He was going to have to get used to the fact that they laughed at danger, not because they didn’t take it seriously, but because they did.

“Dishes can wait,’ she said, when he was done and wasn’t actually looking for the sink. “Come on. We’re going upstairs.”

His wings tightened further. “Why?”

“Because it’s the only place we can both get comfortable while I go digging in your mind.” She smiled brightly at him, like she was flirting or something.

He responded with exactly the glower she’d imagined he would. “You don’t have to do that.”

“That’s my call.” She didn’t think the calm, matter-of-fact voice would slap him down the way it might a 20-year-old, but it did suffice to startle him, if the wing-quiver was any indication. “Come on. Upstairs.” She tilted her head in the proper direction and waited until the implied order got him moving. “Come o, Luke,” she teased, now that he was starting to think, “some people would be thrilled at the chance to get in my bed.”

“Some people aren’t your senior by centuries,” he muttered.

If he was going to feed her straight lines like this all the time, she was going to get lazy. “Oh, I don’t know,” she retorted to his back. “I’m pretty sure Mike’s a bit older than that.”

At this rate, she wasn’t even going to have to work to see what he was like really, really agitated.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1200388.html. You can comment here or there.

A double-crack alternate universe in which Leo gets an army and then takes over the northwest.

Black Knight and White Queen from the 9th and White Knight from the 10th and
Red Queen from the 11th,
and Domination and
Captured Knight and Captured Knight continued, and several pieces by inventrix, most notably this one, which comes directly before the story below.

When her teleporter brought Luke to her door that evening, Cya thought he looked a little bit like he’d been punched in the stomach.

She’d been expecting something of the sort, so she was pleased not to be wrong in her impressions. “Come on in,” she encouraged him, because she was pretty sure he’d not remembered the threshold portions of being Kept — he had none, anymore; anyone could walk into any place that was his unless she claimed it as hers; in return, her threshold was open to him. “Let’s get some food in you and some first impressions out of you.”

Cya liked cooking. She hadn’t liked it when she’d started, but somewhere along the line she’d gotten very good at making virtues out of necessities. For Luke, whose Mara body (with is enviable healing factor) was still working overtime fixing the rest of the damage Leo had done to him, she’d made a heavy stew and a crusty loaf of bread.

He sat in the low-backed chair she kept around for winged guests and stared at the food as if he couldn’t imagine eating. That was normal enough, although she hadn’t expected it from him. Cya sat down on the other side of the table and started eating her own.

That got him moving. After a few bites, when the flavors started getting through his haze, he looked up at her. “This is good.”

“Thank you.” She didn’t bother with teasing him; he was hardly there enough to notice she was doing it, yet. “How did the army tour go?”

He snorted, mostly to himself. “Army.'”

Cya smirked, because he wasn’t looking at her, and because he hadn’t really internalized being Kept yet. She didn’t know if he would — and she wasn’t sure, yet, how much she’d force the process. “You’re not impressed?” She found it unlikely that was the case. Leo and his army had taken over the Northwest. They were disciplined, relatively clean, and efficient.

He made eye contact with her and seemed to be considering what he was going to say.

That was a habit she wanted to nip in the bud, especially with a Kept two centuries older than she was. “Tell me.”

He made an entirely-unconscious-sounding noise at the order. “It’s not an army, it’s a cult. A well-armed, well-disciplined armed force… and a cult.”

Unlike a younger Kept, he didn’t slap his hand over his mouth. But he did take a bite of his bread as if he wanted to tear something else with his teeth.

“It is,” Cya agreed, and did not laugh at him. “It’s been growing for a while. You should see him when he does a public speech.”

“And he knows it.”

“Yeah.” She stabbed her stew with her fork. “Yeah. He does.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1200350.html. You can comment here or there.

A double-crack alternate universe in which Leo gets an army and then takes over the northwest.

The position was not exactly comfortable; Luke was kneeling on the stone floor of Cya’s house, and she was standing behind him, between his wings, where he couldn’t quite see her, where he couldn’t quite move his wings properly. Luke wasn’t sure he could move if he wanted to, and some part of him wasn’t sure he wanted to. He had to see this through, he insisted to himself. He had to do this properly, if he was going to keep sending his students to this.

Cya’s fingers settled on Luke’s collarbone; she leaned over him until he could feel her pressing against the back of his head. “Hold still a moment,” she murmured.

The order seemed to shoot straight down his spine. He made an involuntary noise as he tried to shift and couldn’t, tried to flap and most definitely couldn’t. He thought he heard her chuckle, but then she was doing a Working and he was too focused on that to think about what a laugh meant in this context.

It was an Eperu Working, earth, stone… silver? She was holding something against one of his collarbones, he realized, something cold and hard, like a stone or a pebble.

The Greek was complex, and she threw in Latin and at least two languages he didn’t recognize, but Luke was good with Eperu – it was his best Word, after Kwxe, fire, force, and he could follow most of it. She was transmuting, shaping, controlling. She was changing the pebble…

…into the collar, he realized, with a stab of panic. She was really going to collar him. The metal was already sliding around his neck. She was going to show him off, like… Like…

His mind flickered back to her first year, to Leo’s collar (after collar, after collar), to Yoshi’s first year, to Kept he had seen standing by Cya’s side over the years. She was wrapping the metal around his throat, of course she would. He snorted quietly to himself. He was being ridiculous. He’d agreed to twelve years. He agreed to be Kept. Of course it was going to come with a collar, not a necklace like some…

He snorted again. Like a cy’Luca Keeper might do.

“Funny, is it?” She’d leaned over; her voice was right against his ear. If he’d been able to move, Luke might have jumped. She was screwing with his situational awareness. This whole thing was screwing with his head.

“It’s just…” he cleared his throat. “It’s just… uh. You’re not a cy’Luca.”

She chuckled. He wasn’t sure that was a good sign or not. “No. Never have been.” She patted his shoulder. “There. You can move. You can stand up, if you want.” Her fingers slid over the back of his neck, tugging the new collar against this throat. “Maybe go check the collar out in the mirror.”

Luke shifted, but she was still holding the collar. “I think… I think that can wait.” Maybe if he was clever, it could wait twelve years.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1199847.html. You can comment here or there.

A double-crack alternate universe in which Leo gets an army and then takes over the northwest.

After:
Black Knight and White Queen from the 9th and White Knight from the 10th and
Red Queen from the 11th, which read first, because Au.
Title from – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domination_(chess)

She watched the gears turn in his mind. She wondered how much self-control he actually applied to his wings, and how much of that was failing because they hadn’t fully healed his wings.

It hadn’t been her kindest decision, but she wanted him off-balance, because she was about to knock his feet out from under him. Cya didn’t believe in fighting fair when she had a chance to build an advantage.

Right now, his wings were twitching, the tips of them moving as he considered folding them closer to his back and considered opening them. She thought it might be distracting him.

“Twelve.” His voice was harsh, but he was smirking, albeit tiredly. “But I want terms.”

“My Mentor raised me well.” She passed though the meal slot a single piece of paper. There weren’t many items on it; she had the upper hand, after all.

He raised his eyebrows at her. “There’s already a clause about not attacking Addergoole.”

“I’m not stupid. You wouldn’t sign away your freedom if you thought you were putting Regine and VanderLinden at risk. Besides, while it would be a lie to say I have no quarrel with Addergoole… my grandkids are there. I have no desire to have a battle with Addergoole.”

Yet.

He read the paper twice. “I should ask for a lawyer,” he muttered.

“I could call for a cy’Law, if you want. We have a few.”

She was laughing at him, and he knew it. Strangely, he smirked back at her.

“Wouldn’t help. All right. Twelve years, under these terms. Then what?”

“You do what you want with your life, having promised not to attack me, Leo, Boom, or Cloverleaf.” The answers were easy. She was on familiar ground, here.

“You sound like you think I’ll want to?” He was tired, and his words were slurring. But he kept trying.

She sighed at him in exasperation that was more affectionate than she meant it to be. “I sound like the woman who has plans to make plans. I cover my bases, sa’Hunting Hawk.”

“Sa? Still?”

“You deserve it, even when I’m furious with you.”

“Because I beat up Leo.”

“Because you escalated a situation before I was prepared to properly deal with it. And because you beat Leo into a pulp.”

“He wouldn’t stay down.” His wings spread, and he hardly winced. They weren’t unfolding all the way, though. She’d have to make sure that was treated before it healed wrong.

She quirked her eyebrows at him. “Stay down, sa’Hunting Hawk. Twelve years.”

He took a breath, sighed, and bowed his head. “From now until this day twelve years from now, I Belong to you, … sa’Red Doomsday. You will shall become mine, and what I have shall come from you.”

It had been easier than she feared. “From this day and for twelve years, you Belong to me, Luca Hunting-Hawk. My Name shall encompass you and my will and hand protect you. You are mine.”

He took a breath. “Yours.”

She stood up and moved to the door, unlocking it. “Come here. Get out of there before it scrambles your brains.”

It took him a moment to move, startled, perhaps, by her tone, or maybe just exhausted. He had been dazed and out of it since Regine had released him; that would take some digging. While he moved, she rattled off her standard orders: no attacking her, no attempting to run away, no trying to use magic or coercion to free himself… “If you attack Leo again in anything other than a sparring situation, I am going to make you regret the day you were born and every choice that lead to your presence here before me. Do you understand?”

He didn’t flinch, but she could see in his eyes that she’d startled him. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Come on. You need some fresh air, you need a change of clothes, and you need a Healer.” She walked briskly to the stairs, knowing he would follow her. “I’m going to give you a couple days to recover, and then I’m sending you to Leo, to be his aide.”

She heard his footstep falter behind her. She didn’t slow or turn around. “His…” his voice was even more hoarse now. “You really are pissed at me, aren’t you?”

“If you think I’m pissed at you, Luca, you might imagine how angry I am at Leo.” She softened her voice, just a little. “But this isn’t a punishment, not for either of you. I think he could use your expertise. And, if he turns out not to want it… I have a school full of children who need combat training.”

Now, she turned, and touched Luke’s cheek. “I’m going to keep you busy, very busy, for the next twelve years.” She smiled gently at him. “I think you’ll like it.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1198768.html. You can comment here or there.

A double-crack alternate universe in which Leo gets an army and then takes over the northwest.

After:
Black Knight and White Queen from the 9th and White Knight from yesterday, which read first, because Au.

“Ten years.”

She was sitting on the other side of a glass window that Luke couldn’t break — not that he’d tried all that hard. They were speaking through a telephone. The resemblance to a pre-war prison did not escape Luke.

“That’s a long time,” he stalled. It wasn’t, really. Not to creatures as old as they were. “You can’t send me to attack Addergoole.”

“I can,” she countered, “without your assent, without you agreeing to a collar. Regine has some pretty nice blocks on your mind — but I’m better than she is.”

The ache in his wings reminded him why he wasn’t flapping temperamentally. He pulled them close to his body. He should have been healed already. This place was getting to him. “You’re arrogant.”

“I know how good we are. I know how much we practice our skills. Ten years — and I will choose not to send you to attack your friends.”

Luke forced himself to keep his wings still. “I let you put me in here.”

“You didn’t make us fight to put you in here,” she agreed. Or didn’t agree. It was hard to tell with the damn cy’Drakes. “I won’t send you to fight Addergoole. I’m a bitch, but I’m not a monster. Ten years.” She ticked it off on her fingers. “You get four years to teach — under my collar, but under your own aegis and with no orders about your teaching — at Addergoole, but most of the summer and half of your weekends are mine.”

“That will make Mentoring hard.” At this point, he thought he might be arguing just so he didn’t give in. He thought about Leo. He thought about breaking Leo’s ribs and telling him “just stay down, damnit.”

He wasn’t ready to stay down.

“You can bring them with you. It might do both Doomsday and Addergoole kids good to mingle.”

“You mean that? Bring my students to weekends you said were yours?” He couldn’t help but sneer the words.

She smirked at him. “I’m not about to have a romance with you, Luke. And I’m not sure how sex would work out, but I suppose we’ll figure that out later. In case you hadn’t noticed, I already have a romance.”

“You already have Leo, you mean.”

There was a pause. She leveled a look at him. In a less vulnerable position, Luke might have found it interesting. Cya was cold. She was steady, she was emotionless.

Not this time.

“He is the love of my life,” she said, her voice calm but her expression anything but. Her eyes were half-lidded, one hand flat on the table and the other white-knuckling the phone. “And now would be an unwise time to suggest otherwise.”

Luke thought the expression on her face was familiar, but he could not place where he had seen it. What he could tell was that she was entirely sincere. He held up his hands in surrender. “You have Leo,” he agreed carefully. “I don’t expect to get in the way of that.” Truth be told, he had no idea what to expect.

“So bring your students here on the weekends, if you want. Cloverleaf is safe. The Kept ones will probably appreciate the break. If they don’t, then you know they either have a really good Keeper or you have to really look into their Keeping.”

Luke found himself startled at her stark assessment. She twisted her lips in something like a tired smile at his expression.

“We had a few get past us. Bad Keepers, sneaky bad Keepers.”

“It’s awful, isn’t it?” Luke thought back through the years. “The feeling when you were looking and missed it anyway?”

“It’s horrible.” She sat quietly for a minute. “I try to be a good Keeper. It will be weird, because it’s you, but I’ll do my best.”

“Ten years…” Luke considered. “You were very angry.”

“You and I both know it had to be long enough to make Regine think it was worth as much as her not attacking me.”

Luke considered that. He thought about the oaths he’d been freed from and raised his eyebrows at her. “You planned this.”

“I did not plan on you beating Leo nearly to death.” The fierceness was back. “That fucked up every single thing I had in place for dealing with this, ah, army. And everything that goes along with the army.”

“Everything that–?”

“That’ll wait until you’re under my collar and my orders. You fucked up my plans considerably. But… of course I had back-up plans.” She smiled crookedly. “Even Addergoole should have figured that out by now.”

“You always have back-up plans.” He nodded slowly. “You didn’t plan on me attacking Leo. But you had a plan if I did. And…” he spoke slowly now. It almost didn’t seem real. “Your plan included getting me out of my promises to Regine.”

“Ten years sounds like a long enough break to decide if you want to go back, doesn’t it?” Her smile was sharp. “Maybe we ought to call it eleven.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1198369.html. You can comment here or there.