It's set to a highlands/pampas sort of climate, on a planet with about .9 standard gravity, soft silver-green heather wide vistas. The breeze is cool but temperate. Jedao sits on the roll of a low hill, knees drawn up, looking up at a genuinely spectacular shimmering aurora, oranges and lavenders and reds. He is very still.
He doesn't say anything. Just goes over and settles down next to Jedao.
He doesn't think it's a good idea to force conversation on this one, somehow. Just doesn't seem right. Or, hell, maybe it's Amos's presence, reminding Holden that sometimes you can just sit in silence near someone for a while, and then your problems feel less shitty.
He follows Jedao's gaze. Breathtaking; nothing like it to remind him how beautiful space can be. Wonders why Jedao picked it, in particular, if it's somewhere he's been, some special association. He doesn't ask.
He holds still, and he holds still, some part of him darkly certain that if he moves at all, he'll explode; some part of him exhausted by the small perturbation it took to text.
Finally, his voice emerges, low and sticky, like hems dragged through mud and blood, incapable of being as cold or as crisp as the terseness of his words aspires to.
"Brief me."
He wants to know what Holden knows so far, independent of Mikodez, presented - for now - as sparely and professionally as possible.
Holden worries at the inside of his cheek. He's not sure if he can, not in a really organized way. Whoever handed over all the info in Jedao's "file" maybe had a higher appreciation of Holden's ability to follow breadcrumbs than they should have, because a road map would have been really useful.
"Okay, well," he says, "Kujen erased your memory of conversations you had with people outside the black box, and he spent years fucking with your personality and making you forget about it."
He looks to Jedao. Damn it, damn it -- Jim has felt inadequate to this from the first day, but it's always been for reasons of intelligence, unsubtlety, even age. Not feeling like he's too weak for it. But he finds himself stuck in a mental loop right now, wishing over and over that Jedao won't keep asking, that Jedao won't force Holden to talk about the parts of the file he can only stand a little at a time.
It's only once that his sheer disgust with Nujen got him actually past the point of just nausea and horror, and the ops deck smelled sour for long enough that Jim gave up on file review for that day. And that was hearing Jedao's voice break the silence -- Nirai-zho, are you there--
Jedao's going to be able to tell how little Holden wants to get dragged through this part of the file. And if that deters Jedao from hearing something he needs to know, Holden will never forgive himself.
"Yeah," says Holden, softly, "I'm not here to be sheltered." So this is good, but it's also awful and he hates it.
He rubs at his face. "You sure?" he asks. "All at once? Jedao, some of that stuff didn't seem like it was really... you. He made your symbols, your signifiers change. Not the main one, the Crowned with Eyes, but the other ones."
He's not saying no; he wouldn't say no to this. He just wants to shelter this centuries-old maddening genius idiot who's so intent on breaking himself. Holden wants to protect. It's just who he is.
"And now I'm dealing with it," he counters, quiet but stubborn.
"I don't. Have any illusions about Nirai-zho is like. But I need not to be obsessing over - over wording, over provenance, over context, whether I can trust any given scrap of information or whether I've reconstructed the history correctly or guessed my own thinking right from the outside. I could stall there forever and tear myself apart while I'm at it. I have to just know."
"You know I'm not gonna say no," says Holden, like a sigh. "You don't have to persuade." The way this works is Holden takes a swing at persuading Jedao, then, once he fails, Holden pretty much just goes and does the thing.
He glances sharply at Jedao. "Or maybe you don't know," he realizes. "Hell, Jedao, of course that stuff belongs to you. That shit he did, that was --" Holden doesn't have words for it. "Theft," he finishes, lamely. "Damage. You can't make something yours just by changing it."
So much for patent law, he thinks dryly, mouth twitching incrementally. Nirai jokes! But James is probably not in the mood.
"Mostly I know," he allows, quietly, not looking back at Holden, which is not the same thing as being certain, but. He's willing to more or less proceed on the assumption. "I could howl and demand and get my way, and it probably wouldn't damage our partnership. You'd just pity me a little more. But maybe I need to persuade you for me. So I feel less like a trapped rabid animal."
And more like a person who can make decisions about his own mind and future, rational decisions instead of reactionary ones.
"I know you want to protect me. I know it's going to be bad. But it's already bad. Just knowing. And I can't ever deal with it, if it stays - just - a hole. If I can't force it to the field."
Holden doesn't really get it, honestly. Like, first of all, his feelings on Jedao are weird and they fluctuate for no apparent purpose or to any logical prompt, so the degree of pity, like, that doesn't have anything to do with this, Holden thinks. But also Jedao's pride is something Holden has a hard time wrapping his head around. It seems... spiky, in unpredictable ways.
"The Admiral's not really all there right now," he says, just avoiding the subject entirely. "Look, I always considered it just a matter of time before I get you those memories, okay? Ever since I figured it out. But I don't want him giving you half, or some weird distorted version. Can you hang on for a while?" It's a question, not a command, but Holden doesn't think it's an unreasonable request. He's really leery of the Admiral playing around in Jedao's head. Anyone playing around in anyone's head, actually, but the Admiral is a little bit of a sketchy figure and enough people have had their fingers in Jedao's brainpan.
"Oh my god," says Holden, rubbing his face. "Do you really think I can keep a secret from you? Seriously." He fixes a look on Jedao. "The only reason I waited is because I thought MIkodez should have the chance to not be an asshole."
"None of it was really his fault," Jedao allows, softly, not quite defensive. "There were. Pieces of it. I was grateful to hear from him. I'm not attributing malice. But you still haven't answered the question."
Certainly Holden couldn't keep a secret if Jedao wanted to know - but he can feel it like a missing tooth, the odd gap where this particular question would never have occurred to him to ask, even with his counterpart having known some of the more innocuous details. It leaves him unbalanced.
He's just really fucking pissed off, at that question, and at the implications contained therein. Pissed off at Jedao's controlled, careful tone. Pissed off that evil like that exists, in any universe, and that the aftermath is so awful.
"And I won't," he decides. "Trust me or don't, just make a damn decision."
Putting it like that is something Holden would do only if he was sure he hadn't done anything wrong. (Though Holden doesn't think of it that way -- his thought process is a lot more simple. Awful things happening -> anger -> being kind of an asshole.)
"You'd just go through my network access instead?" Holden shoots back, knowing it's unfair as soon as it comes out of his mouth. Yeah, he's seen Jedao take it on the Roci internal surveillance, but if he actually cared or had things he wanted to keep private, he would have kept the access on him.
And the control comes back, just like that, clamping down like monstrous jaws: face blank, motions clipped to the point of being slightly jerky as he pushes to his feet, starts walking away.
"Jedao, hey, Jedao --" Holden scrambles to his feet. He has no idea what to say, or how to make this better, and he's not so sure that it wouldn't just be better to let Jedao get out of here.
Ah, god damn it.
"I just want to help!" This is basically a yell, frustration pouring out. "But I can't do this shit! I can't watch you getting tortured like it's a memory puzzle, I can't keep you safe, I can't even save one --"
He should have found this earlier. He should have... gone about it differently? He shouldn't have assumed that the repeated conversations were some kind of game, he should have realized, he shouldn't have been fooled, and, damn it, these are all familiar thoughts, and he's right back on Ganymede, hunting down something already too out of control to stop.
He doesn't look at Jedao. He turns to go to the door, to just leave Jedao to it. There's not room in there for two broken people, and Jedao was there first.
He twists in, as Holden moves to pass him, and for his feet it's a fencing move, fluid and automatic. He catches both of Holden's wrists in each of his hands, gripping tight enough to hurt, although pain isn't the point. He needs something grounding, something certain he can at least pretend he's in control of, even as it's something that stops him doing anything else.
He doesn't know what else he wants, except that James does not get to be the one who walks away. He's quite sure he can't take that.
"If you could just watch," he says slowly, like gravel grinding, "You wouldn't have anything new for me, would you?" They're all trained to watch, in the Heptarchate. They all learn, one way or another, to live with it.
It's not, he doesn't think, a question that needs an answer.
"I called you," he growls, and it feels like glass in his throat, "Because I need help. I'm sorry I'm a cuckoo knotted mess of a fox but I don't fucking know how to trust you more than that."
Of course you know! he wants to shout, and his hands twitch in Jedao's too-firm grip. If it were anyone else, Holden would have made a very sincere effort to punch them in the face. -- Of course Jedao knows; everyone is born knowing how to trust blind, they just forget.
And Jedao's first statement leaks into Holden's focus. That might be actually really fucking insightful -- because if there's one thing Holden can't do, it's just watching.
So he, teeth-grit and hating it more than a little, offers another compromise: "I'll tell you how I figured it out," he says. "Okay?" How, not when. He'll give partway, he'll swallow the anger, just give him something to show that he's not pissing in the wind, here, that there's hope for this idiotic warden-inmate thing.
"Why don't you want to tell me?" Jedao asks, a counter-offer of a question laced with genuine bewilderment, even if he's - intrigued, by the idea of process. "I know you don't think you did the wrong thing, I don't think you did the wrong thing, you're just - seizing on this and I don't -"
He gives his wrists another little tug, to see if Jedao is done with the fingers-digging-in thing. Ow. Apparently not. Someone's gonna think he had kinky sex, at this rate.
It's a hard question to answer, because Holden doesn't really know, himself. "Well, you know me," he says, "I can't keep a secret, but when someone tells me what to do, I get real stubborn." It's not the truth, or at least not the whole truth, and he doesn't like how that tastes. "I just want you to trust me, okay?" he says. "On something stupid, fine. It's dumb. I want it anyway."
Jedao occasionally embraces his own arbitrary bullshit. Maybe Holden can do the same.
"I trust you not to lie to me," Jedao says, quietly, eyes downcast, like it's a confession of weakness.
He grits his teeth abruptly. No pity, he said, but Holden is even less capable of subtlety than usual, and Jedao isn't capable of the kind of pointed vulnerability it would take to yank him around, not now, not as raw as he is. Probably he should let Holden go, like he'd meant to. But he needs someone, and there's no one else he could bear to call, to see him this scared, this confused and barely controlled.
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He doesn't think it's a good idea to force conversation on this one, somehow. Just doesn't seem right. Or, hell, maybe it's Amos's presence, reminding Holden that sometimes you can just sit in silence near someone for a while, and then your problems feel less shitty.
He follows Jedao's gaze. Breathtaking; nothing like it to remind him how beautiful space can be. Wonders why Jedao picked it, in particular, if it's somewhere he's been, some special association. He doesn't ask.
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He holds still, and he holds still, some part of him darkly certain that if he moves at all, he'll explode; some part of him exhausted by the small perturbation it took to text.
Finally, his voice emerges, low and sticky, like hems dragged through mud and blood, incapable of being as cold or as crisp as the terseness of his words aspires to.
"Brief me."
He wants to know what Holden knows so far, independent of Mikodez, presented - for now - as sparely and professionally as possible.
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"Okay, well," he says, "Kujen erased your memory of conversations you had with people outside the black box, and he spent years fucking with your personality and making you forget about it."
He looks to Jedao. Damn it, damn it -- Jim has felt inadequate to this from the first day, but it's always been for reasons of intelligence, unsubtlety, even age. Not feeling like he's too weak for it. But he finds himself stuck in a mental loop right now, wishing over and over that Jedao won't keep asking, that Jedao won't force Holden to talk about the parts of the file he can only stand a little at a time.
It's only once that his sheer disgust with Nujen got him actually past the point of just nausea and horror, and the ops deck smelled sour for long enough that Jim gave up on file review for that day. And that was hearing Jedao's voice break the silence -- Nirai-zho, are you there--
Jedao's going to be able to tell how little Holden wants to get dragged through this part of the file. And if that deters Jedao from hearing something he needs to know, Holden will never forgive himself.
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If he wanted well-curated details, he thinks distantly, he probably shouldn't have sent Mikodez away so quickly.
"I want the memories back. All of them. Not - not testimony, not transcripts, I want my own corpsefucking memories. Tell the Admiral that."
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He rubs at his face. "You sure?" he asks. "All at once? Jedao, some of that stuff didn't seem like it was really... you. He made your symbols, your signifiers change. Not the main one, the Crowned with Eyes, but the other ones."
He's not saying no; he wouldn't say no to this. He just wants to shelter this centuries-old maddening genius idiot who's so intent on breaking himself. Holden wants to protect. It's just who he is.
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"They're mine. Whatever I was made, it belongs to me."
He drags in a messy breath, jaw grinding, face jerking as he looks away again.
"I don't see how that's different from breaches anyway," he mutters.
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Like, avoiding Holden and Fives for days at a time and engaging in really weird behavior.
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"I don't. Have any illusions about Nirai-zho is like. But I need not to be obsessing over - over wording, over provenance, over context, whether I can trust any given scrap of information or whether I've reconstructed the history correctly or guessed my own thinking right from the outside. I could stall there forever and tear myself apart while I'm at it. I have to just know."
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He glances sharply at Jedao. "Or maybe you don't know," he realizes. "Hell, Jedao, of course that stuff belongs to you. That shit he did, that was --" Holden doesn't have words for it. "Theft," he finishes, lamely. "Damage. You can't make something yours just by changing it."
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"Mostly I know," he allows, quietly, not looking back at Holden, which is not the same thing as being certain, but. He's willing to more or less proceed on the assumption. "I could howl and demand and get my way, and it probably wouldn't damage our partnership. You'd just pity me a little more. But maybe I need to persuade you for me. So I feel less like a trapped rabid animal."
And more like a person who can make decisions about his own mind and future, rational decisions instead of reactionary ones.
"I know you want to protect me. I know it's going to be bad. But it's already bad. Just knowing. And I can't ever deal with it, if it stays - just - a hole. If I can't force it to the field."
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"The Admiral's not really all there right now," he says, just avoiding the subject entirely. "Look, I always considered it just a matter of time before I get you those memories, okay? Ever since I figured it out. But I don't want him giving you half, or some weird distorted version. Can you hang on for a while?" It's a question, not a command, but Holden doesn't think it's an unreasonable request. He's really leery of the Admiral playing around in Jedao's head. Anyone playing around in anyone's head, actually, but the Admiral is a little bit of a sketchy figure and enough people have had their fingers in Jedao's brainpan.
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It's not angry, or abruptly flat; but there's something to be wary of in in how even it is, how smoothly controlled.
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Certainly Holden couldn't keep a secret if Jedao wanted to know - but he can feel it like a missing tooth, the odd gap where this particular question would never have occurred to him to ask, even with his counterpart having known some of the more innocuous details. It leaves him unbalanced.
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He's just really fucking pissed off, at that question, and at the implications contained therein. Pissed off at Jedao's controlled, careful tone. Pissed off that evil like that exists, in any universe, and that the aftermath is so awful.
"And I won't," he decides. "Trust me or don't, just make a damn decision."
Putting it like that is something Holden would do only if he was sure he hadn't done anything wrong. (Though Holden doesn't think of it that way -- his thought process is a lot more simple. Awful things happening -> anger -> being kind of an asshole.)
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"If I didn't trust you, I wouldn't just ask," he snarls, angry but also wounded; also, obscurely, ashamed.
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"Jedao, hey, Jedao --" Holden scrambles to his feet. He has no idea what to say, or how to make this better, and he's not so sure that it wouldn't just be better to let Jedao get out of here.
Ah, god damn it.
"I just want to help!" This is basically a yell, frustration pouring out. "But I can't do this shit! I can't watch you getting tortured like it's a memory puzzle, I can't keep you safe, I can't even save one --"
He should have found this earlier. He should have... gone about it differently? He shouldn't have assumed that the repeated conversations were some kind of game, he should have realized, he shouldn't have been fooled, and, damn it, these are all familiar thoughts, and he's right back on Ganymede, hunting down something already too out of control to stop.
He doesn't look at Jedao. He turns to go to the door, to just leave Jedao to it. There's not room in there for two broken people, and Jedao was there first.
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He doesn't know what else he wants, except that James does not get to be the one who walks away. He's quite sure he can't take that.
"If you could just watch," he says slowly, like gravel grinding, "You wouldn't have anything new for me, would you?" They're all trained to watch, in the Heptarchate. They all learn, one way or another, to live with it.
It's not, he doesn't think, a question that needs an answer.
"I called you," he growls, and it feels like glass in his throat, "Because I need help. I'm sorry I'm a cuckoo knotted mess of a fox but I don't fucking know how to trust you more than that."
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And Jedao's first statement leaks into Holden's focus. That might be actually really fucking insightful -- because if there's one thing Holden can't do, it's just watching.
So he, teeth-grit and hating it more than a little, offers another compromise: "I'll tell you how I figured it out," he says. "Okay?" How, not when. He'll give partway, he'll swallow the anger, just give him something to show that he's not pissing in the wind, here, that there's hope for this idiotic warden-inmate thing.
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Get it.
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It's a hard question to answer, because Holden doesn't really know, himself. "Well, you know me," he says, "I can't keep a secret, but when someone tells me what to do, I get real stubborn." It's not the truth, or at least not the whole truth, and he doesn't like how that tastes. "I just want you to trust me, okay?" he says. "On something stupid, fine. It's dumb. I want it anyway."
Jedao occasionally embraces his own arbitrary bullshit. Maybe Holden can do the same.
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He grits his teeth abruptly. No pity, he said, but Holden is even less capable of subtlety than usual, and Jedao isn't capable of the kind of pointed vulnerability it would take to yank him around, not now, not as raw as he is. Probably he should let Holden go, like he'd meant to. But he needs someone, and there's no one else he could bear to call, to see him this scared, this confused and barely controlled.
"Fine. Fine. How."
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