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They stepped out of the portal together, into the familiar corridors of the Athena, where cadets were returning from All Worlds from all corners of the galaxy. Cadets who’d enjoyed festive holiday meals with their families, who hadn’t been called on to perform the only duty in their lives that had ever mattered, and fucked it all up. Let down everyone they’d ever known. Darem overheard snippets of conversation, about travel and homework and clubs, and couldn’t quite grasp how they all still inhabited the same universe. How nothing had changed.
“So, will you be alright?” Jay-Den asked, as the expanse of the atrium came into view.
There was real concern in Jay-Den’s voice, more than Darem had heard from Kaira or, god forbid, his parents, who hadn’t even emerged after the sealing to bid him goodbye.
“Always,” he said.
You’ve started our life together with a lie, Kaira had told him, the hurt pooling behind her soft brown eyes. That life was over. Maybe it was only fitting that Darem would start off his new life with a lie too.
Jay-Den accepted it. No wonder. You will find a way to live with yourself. You always do.
“But, um,” Darem said, before Jay-Den could turn away. “Listen, I’ll tell you this: I’m glad you were there.”
The truth. If not all of it.
There was Kyle. Handsome, charming, earnest, extraordinarily pink Kyle, so sorry about what happened because of course Jay-Den had told him everything, and Darem was the asshole. Again.
Turned out, his PADD could receive incoming messages from Khionia, after all.
It came in during exochemistry, blinking bold and red. High priority. Immediate response requested. Don’t you dare pretend anything you’re doing in that place is more important than this, Darem.
He swiped the notification away, but icy fear, chilling as the deepest sea, as the vacuum of space, was already flooding through him.
Lieutenant Telev was saying something about strontium. The buzzing in Darem’s ears drowned it out. He had to open it. He couldn’t.
“Cadet Reymi. Reymi."
From the tittering around him, Lieutenant Telev had probably said his name more than once. Twice. He exhaled shakily. “I’m sorry, what’s the question?”
“The tensile strength of strontium under conditions of high pressure.”
“I…I don’t…”
Caleb was smirking. Genesis, smug. Sam, nodding enthusiastically, a silent you got this.
But it was Jay-Den’s gaze that cut through him. Jay-Den wasn’t laughing. Jay-Den wasn’t laughing at all.
As you are surely aware, your actions last week greatly dishonored us. The royal family has been gracious, of course. But it is crystal clear that you have failed in the most important task we ever asked of you. The dereliction of your duty will not soon be forgotten on Khionia. Thus it is with great regret we inform you that you are no longer our son. We have already notified the Central Bank of Khionia; we understand the Federation will provide for you now. You are free to make whatever life for yourself in Starfleet that you wish. Acknowledge receipt of this message. Then do not contact us again.
His mother had spoken the words. But it was easy enough to picture the both of them, flanked by a handful of lawyers, workshopping each phrase of the message before she recorded it.
Caleb was at class. Ocam had joined another club, Vulcan baking, or something. For once, it was just Darem in the room, which suddenly felt as big and empty as a shuttlebay.
He pressed Reply, opened his mouth, and closed it, then canceled the reply. For a petty moment, he considered not answering at all. If he was cut off, why not cut them off right back? But that kind of pettiness would only invite more messages, workshopped to have an entirely different tone, and probably, eventually, visits from a few of those lawyers he’d rather avoid.
Darem punched Reply again. “Message received,” he said. “…Goodbye.”
He hit Send. Closed out his messages and sat on the edge of his bed, staring at the bulkhead, until Ocam trundled in with a tray of awful-smelling gray-green muffins exactly sixteen minutes later.
“Wow,” Darem said, turning to face him and wrinkling his nose. “Those look like shit.”
“Reymi! Foul!”
Commander—and for the evening, Coach—Reno frowned at him, whistle in her hand.
“For the third time this game,” she added.
Darem picked himself up off the holo-dusty court, shoulder aching, and pointedly didn’t offer a hand to the nameless War College cadet he’d knocked to the floor. Commander Reno rolled her eyes and zapped Darem unceremoniously into the penalty box.
“What the hell?” Genesis wasn’t amused, when she came around a minute later. “Stick to the plan. The plan is not to bulldoze the other team into the ground. Are you even trying?”
”Well, maybe I don’t like the plan,” Darem said. “Maybe, they deserve it.”
“They don’t,” Genesis said flatly. “Don’t be an asshole.”
The door buzzer was loud in the silence. Caleb was back at class, Ocam gone off to discover some new Vulcan culinary nightmare. It had been a week.
Darem was at his desk, staring at PADD full of stellar cartography equations he was trying, and failing magnificently, to understand. A part of him wondered why he was even bothering—there were no more reports home, no more Dear Mother and Father. Bomb an exam, so what?
He considered not answering. After the last week, whoever it was was probably only there to see Caleb or Ocam, anyway. He stared harder at the first equation on his PADD. Correct for the gravitational shear due to dark matter, then…
Another buzz. Longer, more insistent.
“Fine,” Darem muttered, standing abruptly, his studying good and properly disrupted. “Yes, sure, fine, whatever it is, god.” He slammed the door panel open and stopped short.
Jay-Den stood in the doorway, frowning. Darem’s breath caught in his chest, as it always did, when it was just the two of them. Even on the matrimonial moon, out of his mind in panic, it had stopped him. He swallowed and licked his lips and stepped back so Jay-Den could come in.
“Are you alone?” Jay-Den asked.
“Caleb’s at class. Ocam’s gone off to that godawful Vulcan baking club. I swear, I’ve never before seen a cake that looked that unapp—“
“Darem.”
Darem shut his mouth. Jay-Den stepped into the room. Darem watched, entranced, as always, by how he moved. All that long, lean muscle, perfectly controlled. He hadn’t been alone with Jay-Den since the sealing. His entire body felt strange.
Jay-Den gestured over to Darem’s neatly-made bed. “Let us sit. If I am not interrupting anything.”
Darem shrugged. They perched together on the edge of his bed, Jay-Den’s knee brushing his. Even through the raw edges of his nerves, Darem wanted to press in closer. To feel him, to taste him, to put his hand on his knee and slide it up that powerfully muscled thigh.
That was almost certainly not why Jay-Den had come. “What’s up?”
Jay-Den’s green eyes met his. “Our friends were discussing your behavior over dinner earlier. They concluded that lately, you have been…a real asshole.”
It landed like a punch to the gut, but Darem laughed. “And?”
“Our friends do not know what happened on Khionia. Darem, I came to ask if you are alright.”
There was an insistent burning behind his eyes and in the back of his throat. Darem shook his head slightly, not in answer, but a denial of the entire question. He didn’t want to talk about this. He didn’t want to talk about this at all.
Always, he’d told Jay-Den, coming out of that portal, and Jay-Den had walked away. All he had to do was say it again, and Jay-Den would leave him alone.
He wasn’t sure exactly what possessed him to do it, except that, well…maybe he didn’t want Jay-Den to leave again, after all.
He snagged his PADD off his desk and shoved it into Jay-Den’s hands just as the message from his mother began to play.
As you are surely aware…
Darem watched Jay-Den’s face as the message played, expecting pity, or dawning understanding, or—on a level that probably had nothing to do with Jay-Den in particular—derision. But Jay-Den only looked stricken. Far away.
“Jay-Den?”
Jay-Den blinked. His jaw clenched, and unclenched. “I… am very sorry,” he said. Then he just sat there, PADD held loosely in his hands, his lips pressed together.
“Jay-Den, what is it?” Darem said.
“No one’s family should abandon them for choosing the life they wanted.” Jay-Den closed his eyes briefly. “It is not right.”
Hurt clenched Darem’s chest again, then flared to anger. “I didn’t choose this, Jay-Den. Why is that so hard for you to understand? I did everything they ever asked of me. I chose Kaira, I chose my parents, I chose Khionia. I tried, so hard, my entire life, and now…” he shook his head, disgusted. “But what could you possibly know about that?”
The words hung in the air between them.
“You mean you couldn’t do what I did,” Jay-Den rumbled, and Darem remembered the words coming out of his own mouth, back on the matrimonial moon. “You couldn’t bail on your family, your world. You couldn’t cut and run.”
“Jay-Den, I—“
“You said those words. You meant them then. You mean them now. Your own family has abandoned you, and you still cannot imagine any possibility other than that I abandoned mine.”
Darem opened his mouth, and closed it. At the debate competition, in front of everyone, Caleb had accused Jay-Den of just that. Of leaving his family. Stabbing them in the back. The full story, he’d never gotten, but… he’d also never questioned it. Never thought to ask.
Well, shit.
Jay-Den was still glaring at him. But there was something else behind it. The exact same expression Darem had seen on his own face in the mirror for the last week.
“What happened?” Darem said.
“What?”
“With your family,” Darem said. “Obviously I’m missing something. So. What am I missing?”
Jay-Den’s eyes narrowed. “You…are asking to hear my story. Now.”
Darem nodded. Deadly serious. After a moment, Jay-Den looked away.
“It is true that I wanted to leave for the Federation. It is also true that neither my mother nor my fathers wanted that for me. Only my brother, Thar. But I never abandoned them.” Jay-Den made a scornful noise and started to rise. “Forget it. I did not come here for this. I do not owe you an explanation. I am sorry your parents cut you off. Goodnight.”
“Wait!” Darem said, rising faster, and put his hands on Jay-Den’s shoulders to push him back down. Khionian strength was no match for Klingon, but Jay-Den acquiesced with an eye roll. “You don’t owe me anything, no,” Darem said. “But…please. I want to know.”
”Why?”
”Because,” Darem began, and there seemed a thousand impossible answers to that question. “Because I was wrong,” he settled on. “I never should have said what I said. I want to know.”
Jay-Den stared at him. Darem stared back. Impulsively, Darem rested his hand on Jay-Den’s knee. Jay-Den’s eyes widened. But after a beat, the tense line of his shoulders began to relax.
In retrospect, no part of the story Jay-Den told him was surprising. That Jay-Den would always have wanted to heal rather than kill. That he had held onto his convictions no matter how little his own parents had understood or how much they pushed him to change. That he had honored the memory of his brother in his choice to stay true to himself. To harm no helpless creature. To seek out Starfleet.
“…and I looked up,” Jay-Den finished, “and our ship, my mother and fathers, had left me behind. Alone. With nothing. Commander Thok believes my father meant to set me free, as a Klingon. But…I cannot help but think there could have been a better way.”
“Jay-Den,” Darem breathed. All of a sudden, the sterile, workshopped recording still blinking on his PADD didn’t seem quite so bad. “I’m so sorry.”
“It is done. I accept what has happened,” Jay-Den said stiffly. “You did not know. You could not have known. I do not require your sympathy. I do not require anything from you.”
“What I said to you, at the sealing,” Darem said. “I didn’t know, but that’s no excuse. I was wrong. I was worse than wrong.”
“Yes. You were.”
A pit had formed in Darem’s stomach. “Look. I understand, if I screwed it all up. If you don’t want to be friends anymore, or whatever we are. I mean. I am, essentially, an asshole.”
He said it lightly, so Jay-Den wouldn’t think he was looking for sympathy himself. He hadn’t just let down his parents, Kaira, his people, at the sealing. He’d let Jay-Den down too.
Jay-Den’s brow furrowed. “Darem. I did not tell you everything so that I could cut you out of my life. Did we not just agree that is a bad thing to do?”
“…Yes?”
Jay-Den’s expression softened. “Perhaps I was also wrong. To say you are essentially an asshole. You are… sometimes an asshole. Now, you are not.”
Darem let out a slow breath. A knot in his chest he hadn’t even noticed loosened.
“I’m sorry about your brother,” Darem said after a moment. “I can’t imagine going through something like that.”
Jay-Den closed his eyes, grief rising to the surface, then sinking again. “I am lucky that I had him,” he said. “I cannot imagine what my life might have been without him. Without someone who pushed me to be who I am—no matter what our parents thought.”
Darem swallowed past a lump in his throat. His parents’ disappointed faces swam through his mind’s eye again. “Yeah.”
A warm weight settled onto Darem’s knee. Jay-Den’s hand. A strange heat spread through Darem’s body. He stared at it. He didn’t dare move.
“We are both free to live the lives we want now,” Jay-Den said. “I know why I am here. Why are you? What is it you want?”
Darem couldn’t help it. He laughed. Jay-Den’s hand still on his knee, lighting him up with something hot and electric, it just burst out of him.
“I was promised to Kaira at seven. Seven, Jay-Den. I never had any choice. I mean, she was my best friend, but I…” Darem looked away. “Let’s just say she’s not exactly my type. In a big way.”
“But your…underwater polycule escapades you have told us so much about,” Jay-Den said. “All those sisters you are constantly asking after?”
“Remember that heel I dated in school?” Darem said. “My parents really didn’t approve of the match. Not because he was an ass, even though he was—but because people were starting to talk. The future king of Khionia, not so interested his queen.”
“Oh,” Jay-Den said. Then, “oh.”
“I played my part,” Darem shrugged. “Always. Even here. But what I want?”
He rested his hand atop Jay-Den’s, still on his knee.
“You,” Darem said. “If I could have anything, Jay-Den, it would be you.”
Jay-Den stared at him, his green eyes wide, lips slightly parted. Beautiful. Darem couldn’t look away. Then it hit him. What an idiot he was. He pulled away like he’d been burned.
“I mean, obviously, I don’t expect anything. I value our friendship, and I certainly don’t want—I mean, after all this, it isn’t fair to—I mean, of course you don’t—and there’s—”
“Darem,” Jay-Den said, then cupped Darem’s jaw in his hand and pressed a kiss to Darem’s lips, and his lips were soft and there was the scratch of his beard against Darem’s chin, and slide of his tongue against Darem’s lip and it was perfect, perfect, perfect.
Darem pulled away. All he could think to say was: “Really?”
“Is this not…?”
“Oh, it is,” Darem said quickly. He kissed Jay-Den back, sinking into it, pleasure pooling low in his belly, until— “Wait. What about Kyle?”
Jay-Den laughed at the interruption, his lips quirking into slightly exasperated smile. “Kyle and I are not…exclusive. I have wanted this too, Darem. I had not thought you felt the same.”
“Huh?” Darem said, intelligently.
“Since the llyene ritual,” Jay-Den said. “But you seemed very interested in other people’s sisters.”
Darem huffed a laugh. Jay-Den took his hand and entwined their fingers together. Darem’s breath caught in his chest.
“Thank you,” Darem said. “For this. For all of this.”
Jay-Den glanced at the PADD still sitting on the bed beside them. Darem shook his head and tossed it back onto his desk.
“Are you going to be alright?” Jay-Den asked.
Always, Darem had lied, when they’d come through the portal. The lie he’d been telling all his life.
“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “But tonight? I’m good. I’m…really, really good.”
Jay-Den’s thumb moved across the back of Darem’s knuckles. Darem wanted kiss him, again, but there was one more question to ask. “And you?” he said. “After everything that’s happened. Are you alright?”
“I am…getting there,” Jay-Den said, and his lips curving into a wry almost-smile. “But I am glad you know everything now. I am glad you wanted to know.”
Darem nodded.
“One more thing,” Jay-Den said.
“Anything.”
“Will you stop acting like an asshole to all of our friends now that we have had this talk?”
Daren winced. The last week, not his best. “I’ll, ah. I’ll see what I can do.”
“Mm,” Jay-Den grunted.
Darem pulled Jay-Den’s lean body closer as their lips met again. That electric heat thrummed through his body, and he murmured happily as Jay-Den’s arms wrapped around his waist and their legs slotted together. They leaned back into the mattress, the kiss deepening, Darem tugging at Jay-Den’s bottom lip with his teeth, Jay-Den’s hips thrusting against—
The door hissed open.
Darem jumped up, smoothing his rumpled uniform, while Jay-Den patted down his hair and cleared his throat and looked around the room as if there was any other explanation as to what had been happening.
“Hey dudes.” Ocam smiled at them from the doorway and held out a steaming tray of gray-green squares with an earthy smell and the apparent consistency of concrete. “Vulcan brownies. Want to try one?”
“Absolutely no—” Darem began, but Jay-Den cut him off.
“Yes,” Jay-Den said, smiling. “Absolutely yes.”
”I think these came out better than the first three batches,” Ocam said. “You don’t even want to know.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Darem moaned, and Jay-Den elbowed him in the side.
Darem knew he would have more amends to make, to all his friends he’d terrorized the past week. Life on the other side of his parents’ expectations still yawned before him, a terrifying, unknowable void.
But he was free. For the first time in his life, he was free. Sitting beside Jay-Den, their shoulders brushing as they choked down awful Vulcan confectionaries, with the memory of Jay-Den’s lips and hands and the scratch of his beard and lean, wiry muscle, Darem couldn’t help but feel that everything was going to work out just fine.