During one of many fights, Detrich and Emen get carried away (post-revolution)

[guardiansverse]

"It's locked," Detrich said after yet another useless jarring at the doorhandle. He had the gall to sound almost amused about it.

Locked. Sun's good mercy. Emen permitted himself to sag very slightly back in his chair, grateful for its tall oaken back. So: everyone from the young Kaiser down had finally had enough of the two of them at loggerheads over the budget, stuck like a pair of billygoats facing off on a narrow bridge. At least the architect of this betrayal - Emen would find it who it was, and make him rue the day he'd ever heard the word politics - had left them in a fine enough jail. Carpeted. A sizeable table between them. A pitcher of drink and bowl of pasties on the table. No access to a water closet, though. That might prove regrettable. Perhaps someone had meant that as a further incentive to hurry things along.

Emen met Detrich's implacable blue gaze across the table. Someone had miscalculated.

"I'll summon a Guardian - " Detrich began, but Emen shook his head.

"Someone will have thought of that. The Kaiser would be at hand to stop them, or perhaps your General Kirschen. Don't waste your time, Land's Own." There was a hint of mockery in the revered title when paired with a reminder that even Detrich's authority bent to his ruler. Emen saw him scowl, and relished it. "No one is coming. We might as well get to it."

"Get to what? You know my position."

"Very clearly." Emen reached for a glass. "More subsidies. More military expenditure. More debt."

"You forgot more skinning the faultless, starving gentry," Detrich said dryly.

"That goes as a given."

"How much does the wine in your glass cost, Lord Regent?"

"How many families do you wish to disinherit today, Fro Detrich?"

Detrich waves a dismissive hand at his face. "This won't be a problem once I've disinherited you all."

Emen made a point of sipping his wine slowly, as if it could cool the fire in his belly. This was utterly pointless, of course. Detrich did not negotiate. He twisted one's arm or had his twisted in turn: he cared nothing for finesse or compromise or diplomacy, of course he didn't, the footsoldier's boy raised up on a tide of blood. The blood of Emen's peers and friends, his kin.

He could not rememeber it now. To remember the revolution was to become the same creature that Detrich was, raging and hateful and driven by the madness the Land's Own called justice. Emen could not have such emotion. Else how was he the better of this base man, this butcher?

He spoke low and could. "Sit down. You are not on a barricade anymore."

"If I were, you'd be dead." It was the truth, and it made Emen feel ill with helpless rage. "Pretend I've sat. What do you propose?"

"You know that your caprices mean nothing. If the budget does not pass until the new year, power reverts to the Kaiser, and even at ten years old he understands economics better than you." A foolish misstep. Few things railed Detrich worse than challenging the trifling education his backwater village had been able to scrape together for him. Calm, Emen snarled at himself, seeing those ferocious blue eyes gleam with gunpowder fury. "You will not get better from him than my last offer."

Detrich smirked, hard mouth curling within his dark beard. "If your lot at the Upper House truly thought so, you'd be content to wait things out."

"How do you know we are not?"

"It wasn't one of mine that locked us in."

"Of course," Emen said flatly. "I forgot that no man in the Lower House dares breathe without your say-so. Truly, you champion the people's will and freedom."

"You want to pass the budget, Stattenholme?"

"I must do my duty to crown and country, even if you don't - "

Detrich leaned on the table, abruptly all too close. "Beg me."

He was not pushing against Emen's mind or soul with his power. But his nearness was hot - it always was, Emen thought, pinned, as thought the fire of the revolution still burned somewhere in the Land's Own Guardian's core. Hot and savage. He stared, pinned. "Pardon me?"

"You heard. Beg on your knees. Make it worth my while."

The insinuation was brutally clear. From another, more decent man, Emen might not have thought it; but Detrich's proclivities were widely known, not even whispered but flaunted in broad daylight. Emen's breathing came hard and fast. The Land's Own would not force him - though he easily could, the slightest flex of the muscles of his power against Emen's soul, but crass and vicious as he was he was no fool. No. No need for fear. "You mock me - "

"I offer you an out. This is you noblemen's greatest skill, isn't it? Sucking the cock of power to get your way?"

"You're a beast," Emen whispered. Detrich jerked his head up, his long dark braid flying like a whip behind him.

"Please, Stattenholme," he said, and he was amused through his fire, eyes glinting, his breathing hot on Emen's face. "You and your kind always thought mine were beasts. Even before the revolution. Since I was born to the wrong man in the wrong house. What regard do you have for me that I stand to lose? You say you care for the people more than I do. If you care for them over your honour, get on your knees."

Don't look at him. It was all Emen found himself thinking, or able to think, as if looking too closely in Detrich's eyes - could fire be blue? - would draw him until his hatred became something a thousand times more dangerous. This man, this bloodthirsty beast of a man, he almost felt a hideous urge to tame him. To rise up instead of sink down and grab his neck and his hair and how him what power he sought dominion over, show him his place and the lie of his daring, his arrogance, great Sun, Emen could almost taste -

He would not succumb. He rasped, "Do you think I'm another General Kirschen? You might have whored yourself out to him for his soldiers, but I - "

To his horror, Detrich laughed. "I fuck General Kirschen's impeccably bred arse every night. More than once when he asks for it. He knows how much a man born to power can enjoy being overpowered." He was letting his accent sound, the growl of the Southwestern backwater. It shivered like a knife's tip along Emen's spine.

He shuddered violently, sudden and all over. No, no, he was better, this was what made him better. A grasp of base passions, reason's denial of the feckless flesh. He pushed himself back from the table, back toward cool air.

Detrich did not move, did not look away. Pulling all his control like armour around him, Emen said coldly, "Does the general know that this is what you think of him?"

He was not surprised that the words struck home, but he was shocked at how deeply they seemed to penetrate. Detrich's eyes widened and a touch of colour drained from his face. Guilt - is it guilt? Impossible. Not from this beast. Detrich could profess all he wish to love the people, that his birth in and rise from the gutter had shaped him a truer, better man than those born to right of rule, but Emen had always known the lie of that. Even the man's basest appetites were for nothing but power. Nothing like loyalty. Nothing like love.

The advantage was surely slim: he had to push it swiftly. "I thank you for your offer, Land's Own," he continued in his coolest tone. "But let us forget any of it was ever said."

Detrich's face was tight. Whatever rage he was holding back now, he did so with the impeccable control of the lifelong soldier. A moment more, and he nodded.

Some minutes later, to Emen's utter shock, the door swung open.

One of Detrich's Guardians was behind it, the poor Kaiser at her right shoulder, General Kirschen to her left. All of them were looking at the Land's Own with alarm and brittle tension. And Emen realized what message Detrich had sent into the soul-web that the Guardian had conveyed on. Come get us out or I'll kill him.

Detrich pushed off the table, pushed through the three - Guardian, general, and Kaiser alike - and stalked away, leaving seared air behind him. Emen got up on feet that felt unsteady. The Guardian looked desperate to make herself scarce, and poor young Kaiser Franz horrified as though he had genuinely expected to come in to find his Lord Regent's corpse.

General Kirschen's eyes were as sharp as broken glass. Emen found that he could not look at them.

And we still have no budget. The thought rose from the back of his mind, duty asserting itself as if to rescue him. But passing Kirschen at the door, he shivered all over, and knew that this was not what would haunt him - tonight, and for many nights to come.