Chapter Text
Jainan looked at the bed. Everything in him recoiled. He briefly entertained the thought of sleeping on a chair, or on the floor, but dismissed the idea as ridiculous. He was not someone who made dramatic gestures. He was practical, and discreet, and a dependable partner. He didn't have to be liked.
He lay back on the bed and stared at the white ceiling. Sleep would come. It always did.
He woke sharply in the dark. His heart was racing and his mouth felt dry, but the headache that had been weighing him down for days was absent. Jainan was good at riding out adrenaline spikes, and he was passable at feigning sleep. After one hitched inhalation, he kept his breathing even. He listened intently for whatever had jolted him out of sleep.
Of course — he was to listen for Prince Kiem, not Taam. But there was nobody else in the room with him. No noises outside the door. He gestured at the lights.
It took only a moment to take stock of the opalescent floor and all-white bed sheets. There was no bird-watching port, and no teal still-life on the wall across from him. Instead, he recognized the monochrome graphic of the Hill Enduring.
Jainan was back in Taam's bedroom. Something had gone very wrong.
Had he sleepwalked back to the wrong floor, after his shameful performance yesterday? No: he would have been stopped by a staffer. The Emperor's Wing could not be invaded by any moon-drunk Theans.
Cold dread coiled in Jainan's chest, though his breathing remained even. He tapped his wrist to check the day's schedule. The wedding ceremony was still to come.
Well. He was losing his mind.
Given that fact, Jainan's options narrowed. He reached for an interpretation that left him with clear next steps.
Maybe the stress made him hallucinate his upcoming wedding day in vivid detail. It was reassuring, possibly, that his brain hadn't made it an easy fantasy. Maybe Jainan could consider himself forewarned, and make it through the day without fumbling his duty to his planet and his new husband.
A second chance at a wedding day, apt for his second-chance marriage.
He dressed with more care than he'd applied when — well, he chose to think of the presumed hallucination as the rehearsal.
After a moment's deliberation, he decided to forego not only his mourning grays but also the restrained blue tunic he'd settled on previously. His new husband deserved his full dedication, symbolically just as in other ways, so Jainan donned his sharp Iskat formalwear. It was politically acceptable, and it might appeal to Prince Kiem — whom Jainan hadn't met yet if the rehearsal wasn't real.
From the clippings, he'd learned that Prince Kiem wasn't opposed to his partners wearing maquillage; but Jainan hadn't the materials or the time to learn how to use anything like that. Instead, he tried to smile at the mirror. The effect was disappointing. But there was a way forward: Thean hairstyles invited Iskaner disdain less often than Thean fashions did, so he braided and pinned his hair in an elaborate, if formal, knot.
The overall effect was strange. He was combining ostentation from both cultures instead of looking for a muted median. But Jainan's day couldn't get any stranger, and he hoped he looked like a better-fitting partner to the (reportedly!) energetic Prince Kiem.
His breakfast was delivered at the same time as during the rehearsal, with the same Iskaner calorie-dense minimalism. Jainan noted with detached amusement that he might have been stuck repeating his day at any time during his widowhood. He definitely wouldn't have noticed; it was only today that something was happening to him.
At last, he stood at Prince Kiem's door, and he felt near-confident. He would not be detached and cowardly today. He'd find something appropriate to say when (if!) Kiem introduced himself, and from there, the wedding day would go well.
"You've changed clothes," Prince Kiem exclaimed from the doorway. For the second time, Jainan's chest filled with cold. The only person in the world he needed to impress remembered the rehearsal's blunders.
"That is to say," Kiem continued, searching Jainan's face with an undeniably familiar, sparkling intensity. "Sorry, but, hi, are you having a weird day? Apart from where you're marrying a stranger. Is anything weird in terms of —"
"Time." Jainan inhaled, exhaled. "Yes."
"Yes, brilliant, thank you," Kiem said. "Bel and I were beginning to think we were the only ones."
He gestured for Jainan to enter. The prince was impeccably dressed in formalwear from the waist up — ready to take calls from the vid chair — but still wearing his sleepwear down below. It had a cream-on-teal altocumulus pattern, with smiles on some of the clouds.
Bel Siara was dressed in the same dark sharp-cut suit as during the rehearsal. She bowed to Jainan, the line of her mouth tenser than he remembered. Jainan bowed back.
"Count Jainan, have you met anyone else aware of the loop?"
Jainan felt a small, detached sense of shame as he shook his head. It hadn't occurred to him to check. Sometime over the past few years, he'd become a solipsist.
"You'd think there'd be something, somewhere in the newsreels," Kiem said. He was fidgeting with an empty coffee cup. "At least the ones that report on supposed troll sightings, prophets communing with culled fauna, that kind of junk, you know? There's literally nothing."
Bel Siara sat down on Kiem's couch, her movements less measured and formal than at the rehearsal. Jainan hovered for a moment and sat beside her. It was time to reconfigure his understanding of the situation.
If all of this was in his head, there were no steps forward. He needed alternatives.
"It must be a remnant," he said. "Nothing else could impact our cognition of time like this."
"Agreed," Bel Siara said. "But why? And are we the only ones impacted, or the only ones left out?"
"It could be a weapon," Jainan said, just as Kiem said, "I don't know which of those options disturbs me more."
Jainan was married, or about to be. He had a clear duty to his husband.
"What would you like to do?" Kiem's state of partial undress made it paradoxically easier to ask him directly. He was playing with the samovar now, running his fingers up and down its chimney. Some of the cold thawed in Jainan. He spotted several unwashed mugs which would need his attention, assuming time didn't reset again before he got to it.
"Heaven, I don't know," Kiem said finally, biting his lower lip. "I'm the last person you should ask about something like this." He raised both palms to signal his lack of ideas, then immediately went on, "I thought we should tell the Emperor. But Bel thinks we should try everything else first."
Jainan felt a moment's treacherous gratitude for Kiem's aide. Then, "But if you think we should ask for an audience —"
"No, Bel’s completely right, I think. I don't have the prestige to explain something like this to the Emperor of all people. I'd just get arrested for trying to prank her, and then I'd get sent to wherever they stash the most embarrassing royal relatives. Under the palace, probably. In a labyrinth."
"I'm sure there's a nice discreet asteroid on the dark side of somewhere," Bel suggested. She looked at him sideways, and Jainan became aware of his face, fixed in some sort of courtly grimace. The rest of him wasn't thawing at the right pace. "Apologies, Count Jainan."
Kiem nodded quickly. "Yeah, sorry for messing around, we've been going feral in here. What do you think, Jainan? Do we try to tell someone?"
With Taam, it would have been a cue to agree with the first proposal. That was not an appropriate way to approach this situation; Jainan was not a junior partner in time errors. "We need more data. Perhaps we could... wait?"
"Right," Kiem said. "Right! Let's find out more, and in the meantime, there's a wedding ceremony we're mildly late to? If we want to do that?"
It was barely more of a choice than before.
But Thea still existed, and so did Iskat, and so did their respective allegiances. If the rehearsal was a failure, today was not going to be worse. Kiem offered him a hand up from the couch, and his was warm and gentle on Jainan's.
"I love what you've done with your hair," Kiem says, "and not just because it's irrefutable proof that reality still makes sense outside of Bel and me."
Jainan inclined his head. Kiem's absurdity was difficult to resist.
"Ah," he said. It was uncouth to leave a compliment unanswered. "Perhaps, trousers?"
Jainan was used to moving through a daze; today's, at least, was a thoughtful one. There was something comforting in taking the vows while sharing a secret with your betrothed. He wondered if this was normal for love matches.
No ink was spilled, the marriage was sealed, and Kiem took over all journalist questions. He was thrumming with energy, and Jainan looked for signs of resentment and found none.
After the ceremony, Bel Siara said she had research to do. Kiem took her hands — she was drumming her fingers against her silver wristband — and he sat her down and made what he called his famous hot chocolate. Bel teased him about famously pressing the right combination of buttons. Gathering data, Jainan thought, and decided that Kiem had a sweet tooth and that Bel's shoulders relaxed the more Kiem chattered.
She left Kiem and Jainan alone on the couch. Without her irreverent, buffering presence, Jainan's thoughts strayed to the wedding night rehearsal. I'm lucky Kiem's in this with me, he thought, with grim but sincere pleasure. He didn't have to find out how far his propensity for manipulation would go.
"I've been thinking about something," Kiem murmured. "When you said the remnants were impacting our cognition, do you mean time's still flowing normally, people just can't remember it?"
"Time is - difficult," Jainan said. "But no. When I woke up today, my belongings were back where they used to be. I should bring them over, by the way, in case everything is back to normal."
"Yeah, let's go do that," Kiem agreed. "Don't want Hren thinking something's wrong tomorrow, if there is a tomorrow. But, if time itself is repeating, then we're not even aging. Right?"
Jainan hadn't thought of that. "I believe so."
"In that case — let me know if this is stupid — I think we should do an experiment." He projected his contacts onto the wall and selected Bananaquit Tattoos & Implants.
A joke formed on Jainan's lips, about strange places to spend a wedding night, but instead he said, "Smart."
"Don't worry, the tech is very discreet," Kiem said. "If tomorrow happens like normal, nobody but will know about Prince Kiem's Shocking Nuptial Addition."
"Well," Jainan said. "If it's a nuptial addition. Would you like company?"
"Yes!" It was impossible to deny the sincerity in Kiem's smile. "And I'm taking requests. Or advice. Or if you're willing to close your eyes and point at a design at random, that'd be a huge help."
Jainan returned with an illustration of a fuzzy, tusked thing on the inside of his wrist, amply covered by narrow Iskaner sleeves. Kiem said it was a beloved local raptor, which made Jainan doubt his understanding of both taxonomy and aesthetics. Kiem had gotten a star on his fingertip; Jainan agreed to pick the design with only a little coaxing.
"Are you tired?" Kiem looked as bright-eyed as he had in the news clipping, with nothing of yesterday's stilted generosity. "Because I'm thinking we could stay up as long as we can. Bel should be back soon, anyway."
Bel arrived with dinner, which they all ate from their laps. They traded plans and priorities, and Jainan felt a strange tiredness settle on him, clear and gentle.
He woke sharply in the dark.