[Please note: This chapter contains references to self-harm and eating disorders.]
The skin of Theseus has folded
into a cartography.
The bones of Theseus have broken
into mongrel catacombs.
If anyone had been in that communal lounge area, Kalypso probably wouldn't have had the nerve to dart out through her door into the facility proper. But it was late, and there was no one in sight. The kitchen was dark. There were other doors she hadn't checked, of course-it was always possible that they were prowling around in one of those other rooms and would come stalking in en masse any second now.
But once she decided to do something, Kalypso committed. She was clutching her pillow in her arms, her duvet spilling out from under her elbows and sprouting between pillow and chest like a great jungle plant.
That hologram table didn't have legs-it was more like a hollow box, she'd noticed during the meeting. There was an open space on the end she'd been parked at when she watched the drill with Redford earlier. It didn't run the length of the table. The other half was probably full of electronics. Still, it was plenty of space for her to huddle up inside and sleep-without, hopefully, being particularly visible or obvious if someone just stuck their head inside the room.
When the door of the team room closed behind her, Kalypso released the breath she'd been holding. It was a false sense of security, probably, but nonetheless some of the tension left her.
It took her a while to work out the table, but eventually, she had the thing on, and she'd figured out how to navigate its recordings at speed. She backed it up, all the way up…to that morning's team practice.
After five minutes of watching them, Kalypso had opinions. After half an hour, those opinions had solidified into grim confirmation.
Yep, Jaegerjaquez had tilted basically first thing. And yep, Redford had fed him a handful more sets of increasingly slower tempo-all of which were either stuffed by Abarai or Yang or sent rocketing to the floor out of bounds-before giving up on him entirely and utilizing exclusively Duibhne at middle or Axel at his back. There was no sound in the recording, nor any chemical feedback, but nonetheless the frustration Jaegerjaquez was turning on his setter was visible.
And the moment Redford gave Jaegerjaquez up for worthless, Yang stopped playing.
Just-stopped. He moved through the hollow steps of defensive positioning a few times, offered the occasional two-man block on Axel, stepped lazily back when Duibhne swung, but even these half-efforts only lasted a few minutes. He just completely disengaged from the drill. There were clearly some tempers lost in response-the hologram of Abarai nearly got physical about it. Redford stormed under the net, did something to break it up-Yang very clearly cited Jaegerjaquez in some insulting way, Jaegerjaquez promptly started over with obvious jaw-breaking intentions, Cu Chulainn caught him, then Duibhne also necessarily caught him, as one man was no enough to hold him back-somewhere in there Axel had started setting to himself, supremely uninvolved in the mess-and eventually, rather than come to blows, the two outside hitters switched.
Yang proceeded to slam surgical strikes at Jaegerjaquez, now defending. Some cuts, some particularly sharp crosses that intersected the space between Cu Chulainn at left back and Jaegerjaquez quite nastily. The tilted outside did not crumble, Kalypso noticed with some appreciation. It wasn't pretty, but it also was a far cry from laying down and dying, or from shutting down like Yang had. And then, quite abruptly, Yang once again stopped playing.
She stopped the recording, panned through it oh so carefully, trying to figure out why. Easily bored, disengages with setter. Was it to do with Redford?
Redford wasn't doing anything particularly frustrating. He'd increased the tempo when Yang had switched in, mixed in some middles and opposites. He had a great eye for reading blockers, Kalypso thought. It was particularly on display with Axel, who was coping with a two-man block while Yang had just the one.
Ah. Was that it?
Redford's sets to the outside were creeping wider. He was giving Yang what he called for, but with building pressure to not hit at his apparent target at the opposing front outside. The setter was trying to get Yang to hit the undefended side of the court. At a point, Abarai cottoned on and started blatantly giving it to him-
Yep. That's when Yang disengaged.
The whir of a motor, a broadening knife of light-a familiar, heart-pounding thrill of chemical riot-
Kalypso froze with Yang's final approach caught between her fingers as Yang himself stood in the abruptly open door, the golden coins of his eyes swallowed by dilating pupils. They seized on her, those eyes-and a Flare speared out of them, straight into her throat.
"So."
With that one word, he left the spill of light, gliding past the doorway without entering. The door closed. Kalypso dragged in a desperate breath that didn't bring any relief.
She'd known this might happen. Worth it, Kalypso told herself, staring down at the frozen ghost caught mid-leap in her hands. Worth it, to learn-what had she learned, really? That Xigbar's analysis of their flaws seemed to be on point? For that confirmation, she'd trapped herself outside her room again and been found by the worst of them.
Challenge.
No, she'd gotten more than just background out of this. Show weakness, and Yang would target that weakness. But make it easy, and Yang wouldn't play.
It was going to be supremely difficult in practice, balancing that-because while she certainly did not want to pique his interest, she did want him to play.
So off the court, Kalypso could simply go limp and floppy, put up no resistance, cower at his barest attention, and scurry to obey whatever offhand demand any Dominion made. Within reason. Where it could be borne.
When they were playing, though…
She had to find him a trailing string to chase, and keep it always within his reach-and then do everything in her power to keep him from catching it in his claws.
The door opened again.
It was like he'd grabbed hold of the Flare he'd embedded in her throat and pulled it out, taking her trachea with it. Kalypso choked on her breath as it left her, staggering back a step as Yang advanced into the room.
He was through the doorway, cutting through the blue-flame light cast by the holograms like a knife. He was at the head of the table, opposite her, his Flare unspooling from him as he leaned forward to run white-hot lightning across her skin.
"Eat."
Something slid across the table. Kalypso couldn't look at it, could barely hear the soft friction of its movement through the roar of blood in her ears. His red hair dripped down in front of his shoulders. His lips were ever so slightly parted, lifted to show the threat of teeth. The coins of his eyes were molten with heat, with nothing she understood at all, because she hadn't done anything, she'd just been here-was that so fucking unexcusable?
"Eat."
Kalypso did not parse that word through the battlefield carnage of chemistry that he was dragging her through. Everything she'd just deduced about him, the best practices she'd outlined for herself, all that talk of going limp and not drawing attention-it all steamed away when the cage closed around her and it was just him and her and the tigers of their chemistry.
She would not pant. She would not whimper, she would not look at him through a flush of desperate frightened, thrilled heat. Kalypso took the things that the Lamb in her blood ached to do and throttled them.
In response, her nerves grew thorns and her bones sprouted spines. Her migraine burst back into full sickly force, breaking up the picture of him with a hundred oscillating worms of sparkling, painful nausea.
"Back off," Kalypso said.
"Eat," he hissed, and this time she heard it, because he bent his Flare into its shape, all of it tightened into making sure that word flensed her.
What he'd pushed toward her was a tray. A tray of sealed food-the same kind of tray she'd shoved back through the dispensing slit earlier.
The Lamb within her bore down on her shoulders, on her spine, wailing with urgency. This was what he wanted! Eat, take what he was giving, do as he commanded-eat!
Kalypso dug through the cacophony of her own physiology, looking for the simple, hollow feeling of hunger-and through it, looking for grace. It was dull and insistent, a flattened low-grade ache, easily drowned by the scream of Lamb chemistry unless she dredged it out of the quiet muck of lesser feelings and pressed it to the forefront of her mind. The burn of the shower had passed a long time ago. By comparison, hunger was a paltry comfort.
But it was something. It was something inside her that wasn't this dread carnal desperation for touching and being taken, for this Dominion to fill the swollen absence within her. And she'd done it to herself-that was the most important part of all. She had planted this hunger inside herself and coaxed it into feeble life.
And, in the end, sometimes, irrationally, Kalypso was simply repulsed when someone told her what to do. Sometimes the most natural thing in the world, to her soul if not her biology, was defiance.
"Find a different toy," Kalypso spat at him, the words coming thick and full of venom.
Yang leaned forward. In the light cast by the holograms, his tattoos glowed darkly across his fingers and the pale skin of his hands. "Open your wrists," he crooned, and shock thudded through Kalypso hard enough to jar her heart. "Bleed yourself out. I do not care. If we had opium in the cupboard, I would be happy to shove it down your throat. But you. Will. Eat."
Kalypso blinked, sick and bristling and confused.
"You will choke before you starve yourself in front of me."
"Then turn around and leave," said Kalypso, like a suicidal maniac.
"Eat, and this gets better. Defy me, and it will get much worse."
"Worse," Kalypso answered, instantly, before she could even think through the word.
"Hunger is the most pitiable of a Lamb's meager defenses."
A shiver raced through her. "Like you would know."
"Eat. You need fuel to play."
"Stop talking like you know what I need."
"We are bodies," he snarled. "We are wet meat in a membranous sack, Kalypso Ixora. If you want yours to give you any pleasure, feed it."
Knocked tremendously off kilter by that, Kalypso reeled a bit-and in answer, his Flare died.
Not died, no-receded. It drew back, still seething around him like a closely wrapped veil, but no longer staticked to her skin or scalding her throat. Once more, she stifled a sound of release-it was like he had lifted an entire layer of pain off her.
She looked down at the tray he'd slid her, and realized it wasn't the dinner tray. It was…breakfast, maybe. Yogurt, oatmeal, a banana, eggs.
The sound of a stool moving. Yang was settling himself down at that far end of the table, watching her. "Eat, and I'll let you back into your room."
It was so immensely unfair, that offer. "If I wanted back in that room I wouldn't have come out here," she retorted, half-lying.
"Eat and enjoy the floor, then."
"Leave," said Kalypso, "and I'll eat."
His golden eyes smoldered in his face, even as he leaned languidly against the table. "Unfortunately, I do not trust you to honor your half of that."
"It's hard to be hungry with you Flaring in my face."
"A lie," said Yang, and a little bit of a smile started at the corner of his cruel mouth. "It is easier to be hungry with a Flare in your face. Doubtless that is the point for you. Get rid of the hunger, Kalypso, and I will relieve you of the Flare."
"You first," she snapped, with no faith in all that he'd oblige.
His Flare all but vanished, suddenly nothing but a sting in the air and the faintest pressure on her chest. "So stubborn. You put the rest of them to shame."
Kalypso sat frozen, on tenterhooks.
What had been the start of a smile began to glitter differently. "Eat."
"When you say the rest of them-who else didn't want to eat?"
"Abarai is an incompetent who cannot keep track of time."
He'd fucking bullied another Dominion into eating, too?
Kalypso wrenched off the lid covering the tray and ripped open the yogurt.
Something heavy fell away from her brain, taking a bit of the migraine aura with it. Across the table, Yang's eyes slid away from hers. He tapped the table to resume the drill she'd been watching, watched Cu Chulainn manage a workable pass off his cross, scoffed, and wiped the whole table clean of holograms. Within a few finger taps, he'd started up something else-three holograms working at the net, and a fourth, smaller one, entering the court, moving into a defensive position behind the blocker.
Kalypso, irritated, set down the mostly empty yogurt cup. "I've seen this already. Go back."
"I have not."
That was not her problem. She had been studying in here. He'd just waltzed it to terrorize her, and now was hijacking her studies on a whim. "Go back."
"You have seen enough of me to grasp that I am frustrated, which is all that there is to grasp at the moment. If you haven't, you're an idiot. Eat your food."
At this point, better just to get it over with. Kalypso jammed the banana into her mouth, took too big a bite, and chewed, probably too fast. Swallowed, took another.
Yang was watching her pass Jaegerjaquez's first out-of-bounds line shot. Kalypso picked up the cup of oatmeal and stepped toward the corner of her end of the table, resigned to needing at least three more minutes before this forced meal would be over and she could flee. Those three minutes could at least be spent watching Duibhne's technique. Even if she hated his positioning, the tiny details of his block were immaculate. Would that she could be that tall, with that long a hover at the peak of her jump.
Yang's eyes flickered to her occasionally. Not often, but enough in the few minutes it took her to get through the rest of the breakfast tray that it made her uneasy. "Open my door," she said when she'd finished, picking up the tray.
"I will open it in two hours. Sit down."
Kalypso scowled.
He considered her for a moment. His brow had creased, ever so slightly. His Flare still clung tight to him, like a second skin, not dispersed but not free to lash at her.
"You said-"
"Two hours. You will get something from that."
His implication hit her in the face. "You bastard."
"I am not stupid enough to let you go now."
"You get that it's because of you I'm-"
"You went back to your lair earlier, and did not eat there. Solitude does not cure you."
"Who do you think you are?"
His attention was back on the drill again, his chin in his hands, his head tilted as he watched Jaegerjaquez try and fail to get a cut past her hologram. "Find yourself another outlet, Lamb. Hunger is not an option anymore."
Her stomach churning with food that had suddenly soured, Kalypso stepped back from the table and considered her options.
She could leave the room, but she suspected he would follow, and be very displeased about it. There's no way he'd let her near a bathroom. If she tried to find another Dominion-assuming any were even still awake-he'd probably tell them…well, maybe all of it. Which might be fine, or might be very not fine. Maybe they wouldn't care. That would be the best possible outcome. They might be disgusted, which, fine. They might be mortified. Painful, but-
None of that mattered, really, because whatever they thought of her, she didn't want them knowing. Like she'd told Redford, on the court, her pride was dead, but it was still a shambling, wretched, mangy thing in any other context, feral and possibly rabid. Kalypso didn't want anyone knowing how she coped with the assault of Dominions. That was hers. Her secret weapon, her shameful cheat code.
She could sit here in sulking silence and watch this same drill again, for two hours, with him. She could pace the room and rant and snarl and see if she could get a rise out of him that might, if she were lucky, result in him storming out. That was, to put it mildly, a longshot.
So, with no more palatable option offered to her, Kalypso got down on the floor, tucked herself into a tight little tangle of duvet under the table, and pulled her covering completely over her face. It probably should have been shocking, that she could actually fall asleep there of all places, with Yang of all possible presences looming so nearby, but then again, it had been a long day.