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The world spins faster than its axis, and the shriek and groan of reinforced metal and the red-light blare of warning alarms is all that she can hear. Inside the cockpit of a fifty-foot mech, a thousand lights hum, and the Pallas Athena, veteran ace mech, one of the Coalition’s sharpest swords, spirals towards the desert at breakneck pace. The controls sputter and stall in her hands, struggling against terminal velocity and the weight of gravity. In the moment, everything seems to slow down: the spinning, her mech rolling over and over in the air as she desperately tries to level it. The warning lights, too many to count, humming in her ears until they’re background noise: overclocked thrusters. Low nuclear core output. Left arm damaged. Dorsal and ventral cameras running on interrupted connection. Armaments at forty percent power and ammunition. The numbers roll around inside her skull, bouncing on the walls and off of her brain. Her wing partners–two good, veteran pilots, are dead. Imperial Hunter-Killers caught them a hundred and fifty miles away from their target, swarmed and butchered the Sunspear Ascendant, and then ripped the Hailstorm November apart in a few salvos of missile fire. They were small, agile things, single-pilot mechs only about twenty feet tall, but enough of them could tear through even the largest, most heavily armed Coalition Juggernauts in a matter of minutes. There were tens of them, and even though the Pallas was a fast, sleek, arrow-like mech, outfitted with enough plasma blades and radiation cannons to annihilate most non-mechanized armies, Priya had, and was, only making out by the skin of her teeth. And, as it seemed, maybe not even that.
Priya swore in the cockpit, mostly just to comfort herself, and nearly snapped her wrists wheeling the Pallas into a controlled descent. The metal husk around her shuddered and whined at the exertion, the scrape of armor plates and thick, corded wiring audible even through the protective shielding of the capsule. Flicking most of the reactor’s power to her thrusters, she lurched back in her seat as the mech tore though the pressure of gravity, rocketing back over the plateaus and through the canyons, hoping to get in range to scramble a backup response to overwhelm her pursuers with sheer, suppressing firepower.
The Hunter-Killers, it seemed, had other plans–four trailed her closely while two dozen more hung back and pestered her with both missile and ballistic fire. Grimacing, Priya shut her engines off, diverted the power to her nuclear cannons, and opened up on the small, darting mechs as they tore past her. Flicking the thrusters back on as gravity started to drop her, she took the Pallas straight through the cloud of nuclear shrapnel, watching on her radar as the school of mechs swerved around.
Priya shut off her cannons and focused nearly all of the reactor’s output into flying as fast as she possibly could, regularly diving and sliding on the sand below to kick up a cloud of sensor-disrupting dust. Though inside the cockpit, she could almost feel the shear of the wind pinning her hair to the side of her head. Now controlled, the warm glare of warning lights had shut off, but for one, blaring alert which appeared directly in her HUD: red arrows for incoming homing missiles. Missiles designed to lock onto and cripple the thrusters of mechs like hers. Missiles which could ground her out in the desert, with no backup, and probably not enough weapons power to overwhelm an entire swarm of Hunter-Killers, all of which could fire back.
“Shit shit shit shit shit,” cursed Priya, rolling and swerving the Pallas as she tried to throw off the lock of the missiles, kicking up cloud after cloud of sand. Still, the missiles stayed on course: three screaming arrows in her HUD, rocketing closer and closer with each passing half-second. Flares, she thought, fucking flares . The Pallas only had a few salvos of them–it was engineered to be as quick and nimble as a fifty-foot, hundred-ton pile of metal could possibly be, normally enough to shake off missiles. But hunter-killers were newer, faster, and had better tech, tech designed to turn her sleek, supersonic titan into a flaming titanium grave.
“ Pallas Athena to base! ” She screamed into her radio, desperate enough to try, knowing they would never come in time. “Emergency–emergency bivouac needed! Team down! Requesting immediate aid!” And then, because she knew the intra-mech radio channels had been snagged and tapped months ago, she shouted with perfectly mock determination, “ I’m going to go out with a bang!”
At the last moment before the missiles stuck, Priya poured every ounce of power in her reactor towards her engines, hoping, with wild delusion, to just go fast enough to break the lock and send the missiles to bloom into dunes of glass into the desert. The boom of explosive impact shook her bones in their sockets, rattled her eardrums until she was sure she was going to bleed out of them if she survived another hour. Her entire mech shuddered as her vision turned bloodred with alerts, and then she was spinning again, only falling for a few seconds before the thud of her mech colliding with a sand dune really did snap one of her wrists. Priya wailed, and barely managed to reach the emergency capsule release with her other hand.
The cockpit, located just below the juncture of the Pallas Athena’s neck, fired out from the rest of the mech and launched its weak escape thrusters. Priya was loathe to leave her beautiful titan, but an ace pilot with thirty-eight kills was more valuable to the Coalition than just the smoldering wreck of her vessel.
The shockwave of a concussive missile exploding next to her blasted the capsule off its course and into the sand, and as it shook with impact, Priya’s head connected with the controls in front of her, and black folded in from the corners of her vision.
When she woke up, she found herself tied to a chair in a sterile, white room, paneled surfaces making it hard to tell where the wall ended and ceiling or floor began. Her wrist jutted out at an awkward angle from her arm, but the thrum of pain seemed distant, as if experienced secondhand. Something that wasn’t a ziptie and wasn’t a cuff shackled her to the straight-backed chair, made from metal and distinctly uncomfortable. Blinking the headache and unconsciousness from her vision, she realized that she was not alone.
The woman in front of her is cold-faced and appraising, with dark, unsettling eyes, short, blond hair, and pale skin. She wore an Imperial officers’ uniform and hat of a cut that Priya, once a dropout of the Hunter-Killer piloting program herself, didn’t recognize. Her boots were nonstandard–fancy, knee-high things of green-black alligator skin, like the depths of a swamp, or the blackness of space. She smiled at Priya, and it was all-teeth, no eyes, starving-sharp like the maw of a wolf.
“Hello, puppy,” she says, her voice almost strikingly saccharine, too-sweet, like a candy which leaves the inside of your mouth gritty with a coat of artificial sugar. “I can just tell you’re going to be so good for me.”
Priya Laneira stands in her kitchen with her wife of nearly a decade, minus her two barely remembered, syrupy-thick in her head dog years, and helps her while they make dinner together. Their house is a one-bedroom, two-story affair with acres and acres of forested hills outside, allotted to them by Mara–Honey’s governorship of the planet. A reward for her service and sacrifice in the War. Priya got nothing–technically she received a medal from Parliament, but in a private, untelevised ceremony with the hundred or so other Hounds that were left, both in recognition for their own sacrifice and as a halfhearted apology for the previous years’ protocol which stated that turncoat Hound pilots should be prioritized and killed on sight. Priya keeps her medal in the bottom of one of her clothes drawers, and never took it out, because it reminded her of the faces of her Hound brothers and sisters, and she didn’t want to remember them, no matter how much like them she was.
Priya sighs, and continues cutting up vegetables for the salsa her wife wanted to make. Thankfully, she’s trusted with knives now–for the first few years they thought she was too much of a danger to herself, no matter how much she prostrated herself and begged to be allowed to do something so simple as help cook . They don’t think she’s going to cut herself open anymore, which is, ostensibly, good.
“Thank you, love,” Mara-Honey says when she finishes dicing the tomatillos and onions and deposits them, along with the ground long pepper, into the food processor. She smiles down at her, and Priya feels the animal part of her shudder in her chest at the praise. She can’t help it, she knows, and even though it hurts to indulge, it hurts more to deny herself. “That’s all the preparation, then. You were very helpful. The meat’s done, why don’t you go sit down and turn on that movie we wanted to watch while I assemble everything.”
Priya is barely listening to her. The words are thick, blended-up in her mind, and she cleans off her knife and crosses the room to sit down on their cushy couch with robotic, unfocused motions. The Hound part of her, the sliver which never left the kennels, is practically purring and stretching itself. A warm, soupy softness comes over her, almost a tiredness, like the whole-body ache that you get when you swim too long. Priya sits on the couch in fluffy sweatpants and a high-collar cotton shirt and curls in on herself, simmers in approval and attention. She knows, logically, that living like this, strung along from one sweet word to another, is not normal, that this is what remains of her after the woman with the alligator-skin boots took her apart. But the part of her that is dog, that likes it when someone tells it it’s done a good job, has much, much more willpower than the part of her that used to be one of the Coalition’s most lethal pilots. That married Mara.
She has trouble with names now. She has trouble with lots of things, but this is one of the strangest, and one of the things which causes her the most silent, built-up fury. For two years, she did not speak a single person’s name except Handler , and now, years later, after all that is over, she still can barely bring herself to add any other titles to her vocabulary. It feels wrong to call her Mara, to call her by her name like they’re equals, like Priya doesn’t need her. So she calls her Honey, because it’s better than her name, and more acceptable than calling her wife Handler , though it still comes out in her sleep sometimes. Priya needs her, because she needs authority, needs someone to follow, someone to guide her and take care of her. She knows, in the logical, pilot part of her mind, that this is another way the alligator-boot woman has broken her. But it is not in a way that Mara, that even she, can fix, not a shard that can be pressed back into the ceramic and gilded. Priya needs to follow like she needs air, and she cannot help herself.
She remembers she’s supposed to be putting on their movie, and frantically fumbles for the control while Mara-Honey shuffles around the couch and places two bowls on the little tables in front of them. Warm lime-cilantro rice, strips of braised beef, spiced corn, vegetables grilled in wine and pepper oil, and the salsa. Her wife eats with utensil sticks, and Priya eats with a spoon, because her muscle-memory has been slowly degrading over years of not piloting and the effects of the neural link between her and the Pallas.
Priya curls into her wife’s side, and only eats after she begins first. Mara-Honey tenses up at the feeling of her body against her own, and only half-relaxes. She does not put her arm around her, like she used to. She eats with one hand holding her bowl, and Priya knows it’s just to keep them busy, so they don’t have to struggle with the fact that Mara will only touch her in the most chaste, fleeting ways possible. There are only two occasions where Mara can bring herself–Priya knows it’s because she can only bear to when it’s necessary–to make sustained contact with her wife’s skin: Mara holds her hand whenever they go out to keep her safe and where she can see her, and at night, when Priya will fold herself into a puppylike ball in their bed, and Mara will wrap her arms around her out of obligation, and, though they both find it uncomfortable to admit, genuine, fearful care.
They eat, and eventually the finish the movie–it was bad, but Priya is still so hungry for anything that gives her a brief glimpse into what normal life for most people looks like that it doesn’t matter–and then they clean up, and Mara does not touch her, and Priya knows that this is the best she will get.
When Priya wakes up and realizes she is not in the kennels, but a clean, bustling, frenetic Coalition hospital, she is on so many drugs that the world feels hazy and unfocused around her, her vision gritty like a photo that didn't develop right. She is in a bed, and yes, she’s tied to it, though not by the rough, rusty metal chains she’s used to, but soft, skin-sensitive restraints, meant not to shackle her, just to hold her securely, safely. For the first time in a long, long time, she does not feel the familiar, almost comfortable strain of a muzzle on her face. Her jaw feels locked, a joint that needs oil, and it moves almost without sensation. Her entire body is unsteady, and even without the restraints, her movement seems altered, delayed by half a second between her brain and her limbs.
Through the painkillers, the first emotion she feels is panic, as a singular, terrifying revelation comes over her: this is not where she is supposed to be, and she is not with her Handler. Oh no oh no ohno ohno ohnoohnohno, she thinks, the words slipping into one another in her fractured mind. Not with Handler Not with Handler bad bad bad badbad bad. She starts to strain against the bands across her arms and waist and legs and upper chest, and one of the readings on the machines she’s hooked up to spikes, and outside the room she’s in, if her brain were to devote faculties to pay attention, she could hear the sound of bustling doctors and nurses shook to alarm by her readouts, and after thirty seconds of ohno ohno bad bad badbadbad where is Handler need her need her needher, something floods in through her IV, and her head falls back onto the hospital pillow with a thud.
The second, third, fourth, and fifth times she wakes up go similarly–she struggles until the doctors knock her out again for fear of her heart-rate spiking into dangerous territory. The sixth time, she manages to ignore the steady monologue of the dog parts of her whining and begging for its owner for long enough that a doctor is able to inform her where she is: a newly-commandeered Coalition hospital on the recently captured moon of Old Luna, right near Earth. The war is over, the doctor tells her, before he says to rest, and, ever obedient, always obedient, she needs to be obedient, even though her mind resists because He’s not her Handler, how dare he tell her what to do, she slips asleep as easy as snapping her fingers.
The seventh time is, arguably if not objectively, the worst. It’s been seven weeks, apparently, and her physical wounds–malnutrition, lacerations, several different infections, a poorly-healed broken wrist, and several more–are mostly if not all healed. What reminds on her body are dozens of scars–some from before, some from piloting, normal injuries for soldiers like her to accrue over a long, brutal guerilla war. Some of them must be bad, because they make the doctors cringe as they examine her. That part takes nearly a week, because they have to keep changing out the people who go over her naked, muzzle-less body and mark down every inch of her skin and what they can tell of her insides, because they keep breaking into tears or vomiting or suffering from breakdowns at the sight of her. Some of the things that seem the worst to them, she barely recognizes as injuries–marks from where Handler touched her, dug so deep they cut into the skin. From fingers, from knives, on her waist and her breasts and her buttocks and all around her thighs. Deep-set bruises from thick alligator-skin boots all over her body. Several brands, pressed into her ribs and the hollows at the backs of her knees. Things that her Handler did to her, both to punish her when she did badly, and to reward her, when she did a very, very Good Job.
She isn’t naked this time, though. She’s in a soft hospital gown, still without the comfort of a muzzle on her face. She’s barely restrained, just a strap across her waist that isn’t even leather. No, it’s the worst time because standing at the foot of her bed is a crying woman in a Coalition officer’s uniform and a nonstandard trenchcoat that Priya got her for her birthday once. A crying woman that recognizes her, the first non-stranger that’s not Handler she’s seen in two and half years. A crying woman who is, perhaps not legally because legally Priya is dead, Priya’s wife.
“Pri-”, she says, and her voice is choked with sobs, weighed-down. “ Priya , oh, I thought you were dead, they told me you were dead, I had to record it in your papers, oh, fuck, oh fuck, Pri-,”
And Priya, who has not seen her in two years, curls up and cries, not because she misses her, though the logical pilot in her, bottled up deep and surrounded by pleasure-seeking dog-instincts might, but because she knows that the home she knows is gone, that the purpose she knows is gone, that she will never go back to Handler, and that nothing will ever be right again.
This is the fourth sortie this month, the pilot in her thinks, it must be getting desperate. They only send her when they need her, when there’s something only she can do, because she is Very Good, because she never fails a mission. The dog part of her, the part that takes up the majority of space in her mind now, does not care. The dog part is doing what it loves, is doing what it’s good for, and it knows that when it does a Good Job and gets back, its Handler will be there with kind, sweet words and Treats, and she’ll get to feel good, and everything will be perfect.
Only if she does good, though, only if she does good. And she always does, because she is a good dog, because her enemies, filthy rebel heretic scum–the people she still sometimes remembers eating dinner and flying with–never escape her jaws, never fast enough to dodge the Pallas Athena’s cannons or the sizzling, focused sunfire of its plasma blades.
Priya–Hound callsign Husky –rockets towards a rebel-scum outpost, her mech alive and brilliant around her. The wind through her hair–a ghost of old sensation she still feels whenever she flies–makes her yowl and purr in the cockpit. In an hour or so, she will be back at base, back in her safe, cozy kennel, and Handler will be there, to reward and take care of her.
She just needs to kill some of her former comrades–she knows she’s not supposed to think about them like that anymore–first.
Three mechs come onto her radar once she gets close enough to the outpost. Her mech is Coalition, or once was, but she knows better than that now, is with Handler now, and Handler, so kind, cares so much about her, told her before the mission that if the rebel heretic scum catch her, they will kill her without a second thought because they hate her for making the good decision to join the Red Empire and be with Handler, so she must be Good and not let that happen.
The three mechs are marked with the same bird-woman symbol they scraped off of the Pallas when she first became a Hound. That means, the pilot part of her says, that they’re Twelfth Cavalry, the Harpy’s Dozen. Her old people, then, which means they must really, really hate her, based on how they near-instantly lock on and switch from passive traversal signaling to active-contact weapons-hot protocols.
“ Holy shit,” a garbled voice says through the comms they’ve been threaded into for years at this point, “fuck, is that the Pallas?”
“Shit, you’re right,” says a second voice, matching a mech which fires off a salvo of concussion missiles designed to scramble a mech’s censors and make it as easy to glass as an old dog, “Captain? Guidance?”
“Laneira says shoot it down,” a third voice, this one with an authority that almost reminds her of Handler, but without any of Her sweet care and affection, “And hope whatever’s inside that fucking thing is alive.”
In a few minutes, the situation goes from being Very Good going to get a reward when we get home and Handler will give us treats, won’t that be so nice to very bad, bad bad badbad bad armor going down too many breaches handler will be so so disappointed in us . The three Coalition mechs are newer than hers, not as fast but more powerful, with stronger thrusters, better turns, larger weapons. They chase her around like a pack of wolves cornering a wounded deer and shred at her defenses until all her flares are gone and one of her weapon arms is glass in the sand and when a ballistic shell slams into her central back thruster and sends her tumbling and spiraling toward the dunes, Priya-Husky has nowhere to go–they tore out the mechanisms that made the escape pod work before they let her fly again. The mechs hover above her and shoot the rest of her weapons into slag, and she can do nothing but sob as a scrapper crew comes to tear her out of her mech and sedate her.
Priya sits in a soft chair–cloth, not leather–in the city, and across a table from her sits her therapist, dressed in modest clothes to make her more comfortable. Julia is nice woman, really and truly, and she cares about her, in a way that is different from Mara-Honey or Handler, a softer way, but one that is also more clinical, more professional. She’s nice, though, she’s nice. She never makes her feel like what’s in her head is wrong, like she’s really broken in a way that she’ll never get better from. Julia is nice, and wants her to get better, and has helped her so much.
Priya has been sitting in her office and stewing for the past twenty-five minutes, because she does not want to talk to her therapist about a thing which last week she explicitly said she wanted to talk about.
“Priya,” her therapist says, and there’s a genuine twinge of care in her voice that makes it hurt all the more. “If you’re truly uncomfortable discussing this with me, you could speak with one of the others, or we could table it for later. I don’t want you to feel forced into doing something that could cause you pain.”
“It’s not that,” she says, and forces her body to uncurl, because she doesn’t need to make herself small like a punished dog anymore, because she’s better than that. “It’s just… it’s hard. It’s not–it’s not pretty. It;s going to make me feel bad, to say.”
Julia shuts off her holo-tablet and looks her in the eye, and Priya Does Not Flinch, because Julia is Not Handler and she is allowed to look her in the eye, she is not going to be punished for it.
“Again, Priya, I’m happy to discuss this with you, but I’m also happy to not, as long as you tell me it’s what you’d like to do.”
“Fine. fine fine fine. Let’s talk about it,” Priya says, and keeps her arms crossed but otherwise sits upright and unrestrained in her comfortable, non-leather chair.
“Alright, alright. So. The last time we talked, you told me the way that your wife treats you often leaves you frustrated. Do you think you could elaborate on that for me?”
Priya pauses, and considers. Chews the inside of her cheek in an old dog-habit driven by hunger, which she has never quite been able to shake.
“Honey–Mara never touches me,” she says, and does not meet Julia’s eyes even though she knows she is allowed to. “She skirts around it, and I don’t say anything because she’d get upset if we fought, but it makes me so mad , and I know I shouldn’t be mad at her because it’s not her fault, she doesn’t want to hurt me, but she’s barely so much as hugged me for seven years, and sometimes I feel like she can’t bear to look at me.”
“What about that makes you upset? Is it just that she won’t touch you–do you find yourself wanting affection in a way that she might have previously treated you with and now doesn’t, or are you reading more into it? Do you think she’s motivated by something which upsets you? You mentioned thinking that she doesn’t like to look at you, do you think you could tell me more about that?”
“I think–I think I want affection, obviously, I need it, as much as I need it when she tells me what to do, but–but I think she doesn’t like to be reminded of the way I am, of the way that–people–have hurt me, and how that affects me.”
“Thank you, Priya, that’s very good to dive into, but, if you’re comfortable, I’d like to hear more about why it makes you angry that she doesn’t give you affection in the first place. Please, if you have any thoughts.”
Priya squirms, fidgets in her seat. “It’s been seven years, and–and it feels like our marriage isn’t really real, in the concrete sense. It’s just–I want to be her wife, and I think that’s what she’d like me to be, but–but she refuses to engage in anything romantic, or anything physical, with me. I know–I know she’s trying to be good to me, and I know she’s got good reason for it, but it makes me angry that she doesn’t trust me to know what I want. I just–she’s my wife , and we used to have sex, or kiss, and now–now she barely does anything, she won’t do anything. She doesn’t trust me, I think, she doesn’t think I can handle it. I know–I know I’m the way that I am, but I don’t–I don’t want that to stop me from ever being any sort of intimate with the woman I’m married to.”
“Do you think, perhaps, that your wife does not see you as an equal, at least in terms of intimacy? That she might be refraining from it with you because she thinks that she’ll be abusing you if she does?”
“Yeah, I think–and that’s the part that I hate, because it feels wrong to get mad at her for it–she’s being chivalrous, she hasn’t kissed me in years because she doesn’t want to assault me, and I shouldn’t be mad at her for that, but–but it hurts , it hurts that she doesn’t trust me and that she might never want to do anything like that again, because I want to, I want to be intimate with her, I love her, and that’s–that’s not enough.”
“Do you think it might be easier if you expressed these feelings to her? Perhaps she feels a similar way, and doesn’t know how to communicate it to you? Maybe, the next time it comes up, you could sit down and tell her some of the things you’ve just told me, and perhaps then you could try and resolve some of these hiccups with each other? Priya, I want the things that you want, and I want you to be healthy, and if you tell me that you want to be able to have sex with your wife, then I trust you. You’re an adult, and even in the situation that you’re in, you should be allowed to make informed decisions about your own body. So, I think you should take it slow, and I think you should try and discuss some of these feelings with your wife. Could you do that for me, Priya?”
“Yes, I can, I can,” she says, and shuts up, and they spend the rest of their two-and-a-half hours this week engaging in small talk about Priya’s garden and the sports she used to like and obscure pre-war movies.
“No.”
“ Mara,”
“Absolutely not.”
“Mara, fucking hell, just listen!”
The two of them sit on their bed in their nightclothes: Mara in comfortable boxers and an old shirt, and Priya in a soft, covering nightgown which goes just past her knees. Mara sits cross-legged and fidgets, staring at her with a concerned, uncertain expression on her face. She’s visibly uncomfortable–shifting and squirming, while Priya sits stock-upright, straight-backed, staring her wife straight in the eye.
“Pri, it’s just–I can’t, I can’t do it, I don’t want to do that to you–”
“Mara,” she says, voice hot with anger, cutting her off with a wave and meeting her gaze. Something seems to boil over inside of her–years, maybe, of simmering, set on long enough that all the soft, polite parts have all but boiled away, and all that’s left is dog-sharp teeth and misplaced fury and all the parts of her that have been shaved off over the years.
“I am not asking you to rape me. I am not asking you to call me your dog, or to pin me down and do whatever you want with me. I am not asking you to not be gentle with me, I am not even asking you to tell me what to do,” she’s not shouting, her voice a thin, micron-sharp knife, plunged into something venomous that drips from her mouth as she speaks. “ All that I am asking, Mara, is for you to treat me like your wife , just for once, just to try, and see if it goes okay, Mara, I know how you look at me, I’m not stupid, I’m not unobservant, I know how your jaw clenches every time you give me an order, I know I disgust you, but Mara, Mara, I am what they made me,” and her voice is raised, now, and she can feel herself crying, thick, round tears rolling down her cheeks and dripping onto the neckline of her gown. “Mara, please, I can’t stand more of you treating me like–like a child that you could never think of doing anything remotely sexual with, or like a pet you need to take care of, Mara, no one’s touched me in years, and I’m lonely, Mara, please, just–think about how this makes me feel when you look at me like you’re afraid of me, I want to be your wife again, just, please, Mara, please.”
She can feel herself breaking apart, now, shuddering, her body wracked with heavy, coiling sobs. Something cold and tight gathers in her chest, and she can’t look her in the eyes anymore. It feels like the first few days in the kennels, like the first time she flew, like the day she got out of her mech and on her knees to propose to her, all at once and all conflicting emotions rattling around inside her until it’s too much to handle, and everything churns together and spills out.
She can feel, faintly, Mara putting her arms around her, pulling her into her lap and against her soft, warm chest. Her tears stain the shirt she’s wearing, and she knows she’s going to be a mess in the morning, knows her head is going to hurt for the next few days.
“Priya–oh, Pri, ” she says, and her voice is hoarse like she’s been crying too, and Priya doesn’t remember that happening but her memory is shot anyways, so she doesn’t care. “Fuck, fuck, I don’t–I, Priya, I love you, I don’t–you don’t disgust me, I promise, I promise, love, I’m sorry, I’m sorry I made you feel like that. I don’t–I hate what happened to you, I hate that I couldn’t protect you from it, that I can’t now, but Pri–Pri, I could never hate you, I don’t–I–It’s complicated, and I’m sorry, Pri, I don’t–I don’t want you to feel like I resent you, for being hurt, for having been hurt, but I think I did that anyway. Pri, I’m afraid, you know I’m afraid, I don’t want to hurt you, and I don’t want to be like a Handler, but I hurt you anyway, and Pri–I love you, I want to be your wife, I want you to be mine. I just–I hesitate, if I’m ever going to be comfortable with it.”
“Mara,” she says, and her voice is tear-sticky and clumsy, her throat raw, and the words scrape along the inside of her mouth like they’re barbed, but too important to let sink back down. “I don’t–I don’t want to be afraid anymore, I don’t want to let them control me, I know–I know it’s not going to be easy, you might hurt me, but it’ll hurt me more if we don’t try–please, Mara, can we try? Please, for me? Can we try?