It's not much later, in Isabella's room, that she asks:
"So... is Alex really a dom?"
"Well, there's just... no domination or submission? No ropes and stuff, it's... symmetrical? Like, both people suggest things and ordering anyone isn't involved in it. It's pretty much the same thing without implements and with both participants being active in decisionmaking and such."
"Well, like, it's a nice thing! I like belonging to you, it's nice to date and stuff. It's a shame in the same way, I don't know, lactose intolerance is a shame, because cheese tastes nice? It's one less nice thing he has. Which, I mean, granted, he doesn't particularly care that he doesn't have it, I suppose, but. I dunno."
"He views the entire enterprise with enough revulsion that I don't think he believes he's missing out, let alone that he's missing out on anything important. I suppose he might feel differently about how much harder it makes it to find especially close relationships but he has a twin."
With Alex gone and Jackson more-or-less sorted out (he manages to recover the ability to sit the following day), Sadde starts actually socialising with other people. The week is mostly uneventful, and he and Isabella settle on a routine, seeing each other every day, eating together sometimes, going to class and, in Sadde's case, work, and practicing their magic.
"Um. No. No it's not. As far as I'm aware, and as far as all those sex ed pamphlets and classes say, the sub can also choose what goes on in a relationship, because relationships are supposed to be mutually satisfying," he explains carefully. "That is also the reasoning behind safewords and aftercare."
"Before we started going out, Isabella asked me to write a list of my interests and limits and stuff. I think the fact that it was a written list was more an Isabella thing than a common thing, but typically the dom is supposed to care what the sub wants, and typically the sub is supposed to be able to say it, especially if it's something they don't want. Again, safeword. Usually 'safeword' is the default safeword itself. But yeah, bringing it up by saying, 'by the way, next time could you not use that toy? I don't like it much' should cover you."
"Because you seem to have a fairly self-destructive streak when it comes to this relationship, or at least unhealthily self-effacing, to the point that you didn't even tell your dom you didn't like something, so it would be in-character for you to neglect your health if you believed it would jeopardize your relationship, I think."
"I—I—I—"
But Tobias has spotted them and stood up, beaming. He's a tall, handsome man, and he has enough presence one almost feels like he's carrying several implements on his person, but he's prim and proper as only a conservative dom can be. His wife and kids are present, too, and Sadde's half-brother stands up as well, though he's more neutral than anything, and certainly no older than twelve if that.
"Well, it's nice to finally meet you!" Tobias says to Alex. "You must be Sadde's dom, yes?"
Sadde looks at Isabella, his eyes suddenly devoid of emotion, and then moves to obey.
Isabella pulls Sadde to the other end of the table and uses her cane to corral a kneeling cushion from another table and sits him on her right where the table will block the line of sight between Tobias and him if he hunkers down.
She glares daggers at her mother.
"Yes, I do apologize for assuming. It is my pleasure to meet you both," he says, and sounds for all the world like he means it. "These are my son Jonathan, my wife Bethany, and my daughter Sarah."
"It's nice to meet you," Jonathan says, and smiles a bit. The other two merely dip her heads in acknowledgement.
"I see, I see. And has my daughter been good? She's always been a bit of a troublemaker, back home." He doesn't even try to look at Sadde or acknowledge he exists, so he doesn't notice it when the boy winces at being misgendered. Or maybe at the question as a whole, it might stir up some memories.
('Set him straight' also provokes a wince.)
And presently Renée's phone rings. "Excuse me," she apologizes, but she answers it.
"Oh - oh no!" she exclaims into the phone. "And will he - oh dear, I see. They're both here, I'll let them know. Thank you, Officer Mayhew." She hangs up, blinks several times, and says, "The twins' father has been injured in the line of duty. I'm afraid none of us are going to have any appetite until we know he's all right. I'll be delighted to buy all four of you dinner but we ought to be at home - Officer Mayhew is about to be off duty and most of the force only knows my landline number."
At that Sadde's eyes are full of emotion again, looking at Isabella, and the emotion is please no.
"Harmed, possibly shot, it sounded like he was in the hospital. I think I'll keep my pet with me for emotional support while I deal with that, and not disrupt whatever plans you had already made for Easter. Come, lovely." She stands up and hooks a finger into Sadde's collar and pulls him towards the exit.
"There's no evidence, I used magic to heal everything, he never abused the other two, unless you count indoctrinating them into whatever nineteenth-century view of roles he has as abuse, it's literally my word versus his, a nice preacher of a congregation, everyone loves him, handsome, rich, who would believe the wayward kid of the crazy sub-turned-dom who left him and then drove herself into a ditch seven years later."
"I know, that's not what I mean. We'd have to lie about you being my dom, Tobias could get people to say that I've always acted submissive and that this was an act of rebellion against him after joining school, hell he might even find people from school and get them to testify about my being your sub, it would totally be a thing he'd try to do."
"I know, but I'm not sure I'd be able to not tell you, and right now I don't want to—I mean, I don't want you to know the details." He buries her face in her neck. "Dn't wnt you t' see m' like ths," he mumbles. "But I'd want you to be there anyway. Gee, very consistent and thoughtful of you, brain, here's a cookie," he says a bit more clearly, and sighs.
She pets him. "Oh my lovely," she sighs. "...Renée's a mandated reporter, not about you but about her students so she might know a few things about how this tends to go, if she or her social worker friend or whoever thinks you have a shot at winning can you tolerate an investigation and maybe a court case?"
"She can do—house stuff. Cleaning and cooking and shopping. She doesn't work, Tobias' family is rich and they mooch off it, also he's an engineer. I think she might be able to find a job without Tobias around, but she can't really be a mom. And Jonathan might want to take over and take care of the other two and he's eleven."
Squeeze. "And maybe Tobias's parents will help look after their grandkids or something. It sounds like your half-siblings have a lot more support available than you do and it is okay for you to grab more until you have this extremely basic thing you need of not being terrorized."
"You might also be able to run away, especially if you can shapeshift well enough to look like somebody else and a little older. You - look, how much information security do I have to maintain about things with Alex in the car, I figured under the circumstances it was better to spill the beans about Tobias to him and Renée than make you sit in that restaurant a second longer but about other stuff."
"Sadde's never been to virtuality. If he ran away and didn't dare approach civilization - they're not likely to spend psion resources on tracking you down, or at least it'd take a truly astronomical amount of money from your dad to hire a private one. And you've done it before."
"My father, not my dad," he says. "The first time, I hadn't seen him since I was four, my mom was taking care of me, he had probably forgotten about me, she had custody and he had no interest in keeping a child that was so obviously not going to behave. Then he had custody again and I was his job. And then he gave up on his job. And then there was you, who not only managed to collar me but did so while being female, you're not a sub, and you're letting me stay a boy at least sometimes so you're doing it all wrong. Way he works, you challenged him. He might not hire someone to track me down, but only because then he'd know I wasn't with you either." Pause. "And then I wouldn't be with you, or at school, and that'd be terrible."
Sigh. "Okay, let's—look at possibilities. What can he do, to make my life bad? He can pull me out of school, he can threaten to do so if I don't come home for holidays or something, he can threaten to do so if I don't act verifiably submissive and am female all the time... How hard would it be for me to get rid of him, to have him not be my parent, is the fact that I don't want him to be my parent enough?"
"Supposing my father wants to pull me out of school, and supposing I would rather set myself on fire than that, do you know if there's a way for me to not have to, given that he has had me heal every injury pretty thoroughly and it's only my word against his on the abuse?"
"...The situation isn't what it should be. With a sufficiently rabid prosecutor you could get it to trial, and if you did you might win, but there's nothing guaranteeing you'd be able to employ one of those. I can put you in touch with a social worker if you want a more expert opinion."
"I suppose you're right," he says doubtfully. "My mom never told me about Tobias mistreating her, but then she died when I was just shy of eleven, she might not've wanted to talk about it... But as far as I can tell, my father's perfectly fine to people he believes are following whatever natural order of things's in his head."
"Oh, of course," says Renée, and between bites of leftover pizza and the last of the tuna salad she talks about her current hobbies and her job and her friends and asks Sadde carefully-delinated similar questions about school and interests and his library job.
And he answers those and asks a few other relevant or clarifying questions back and tries to be generally charming and friendly and it's really really obvious he really really likes Isabella and other than Tobias his life is turning out much okayer than he'd ever expected it to.
"I didn't exactly sign up for losing a third of my life unconscious, I'd prefer not needing sleep. Being able to sleep on a strictly voluntary basis might be good, but being completely incapable of sleeping would be a strict improvement over being completely incapable of being alive without it."
"But you weren't suffering so much. Guy uses stuff on you you don't like, basically tells you to fuck a girl without a condom, you're repressing enough upset that you're crying—Jackson, this isn't good for you. And yes therapy, even if in the short term it doesn't help, in the long term it will, and you'll find a dom that actually loves you."
"So maybe I don't get to be happy for more than half an hour in a row, maybe that's just my life. Not everybody can just show up and be the new kid in school and land the hottest dom in school and get hand-fed breakfast and called 'pet'. I'm lucky anybody would look at me twice let alone collar me."
"I can throw books at you, if you like, talking about how depression works. I don't need you to take it on faith, like I said, you could go to therapy and stay with him so that if one thing fails you still have the other. It doesn't have to be either-or, and you could collect the evidence yourself."
"But you don't. Not really. Or, maybe you belong to him, but he doesn't really... own you. And... even thinking long term, I don't know if he'd even keep you. He doesn't act like he's concerned about the long term, about keeping this relationship alive and nurturing it and keeping you."
"I mean he doesn't really care about you. What I just said. It's a type, this thing you're going through, and I expect either he'll get tired of you eventually and move on, or he won't but he'll keep doing enough of, of this, that you won't really even be you anymore in the end, the half hours of happiness will become fifteen minutes, then five, then they'll disappear completely."
"Because it's a type," she insists. "It's the sort of thing they warn about on sex ed classes, or books, or pamphlets. Just like the way you describe yourself is basically textbook clinical depression, the way you describe your relationship and the way you look sometimes is textbook abuse."
"You have time, is what I'm getting at. It's not the end of the world if this one relationship fails, you're not doomed forever if you don't find someone who really loves you now, or in the next ten years, or in the next hundred years, and I don't think it'll take that long."
"More than half of your entire life so far you spent as a child, and trying to predict what your life will be based on the few years of adolescence you've had so far is... tunnel vision. The reason I have to think you'd be able to find somebody is that most people do, regardless of how awful their life is when they're teenagers, especially when said awfulness has a name and a treatment."
"Look, Jackson, the world isn't a nice enough place that solutions to problems just pop out when you need them. I haven't taken over it yet. I'm not sure what you want me to say, and I really don't understand your reluctance. In the very worst-case scenario, you two break up and therapy doesn't work and you find someone else, which like you yourself said was just a matter of actually going to town. And, again, the worst-case scenario won't happen because therapy and pills and psionics will help."
"I thought it was harder for you to find someone to date because you're depressed, and that that was probably contributing to your not having found it by then, and I still think that. Additionally, you look like the kind of person that needs someone to take care of them. You've convinced me of that. But I think not having someone to take care of you isn't the sole cause of your not being a hundred percent, as evidenced by the fact that now you do and yet."
She shrugs. "It's kinda like Tobias' situation, I figure the best I can do most of the time is just... hope for the best. His dom is an emotionally abusive twit but Jackson still prefers him to being alone, and won't go to therapy while they're together because he thinks the therapists will object to the relationship and might break confidentiality."
"We might get catcalled, I suppose, though I have short hair and the collar might not be all that visible from a distance depending on what I'm wearing, but in any case I think that'd lift his spirits. Doing other things, I mean, not being catcalled, although now that I think of it that too, possibly."
Eventually Isabella runs out of melty cheese to put on things (bread, celery sticks, baby carrots, broccoli and cauliflower florets) and in Sadde's mouth. She wipes out the inside of the fondue pot with a paper towel, sets chocolate to melting instead, and starts feeding her pet things which would not be suited to dipping in either. Here's a potato chip.
And she had known, on a verbal level, that chocolate was tastier than most food, and that chocolate-covered things probably would be, too. That doesn't mean she was prepared for it. She wasn't.
And then she sets about tying Sadde up with plenty of incidental fingernails.
Sadde's patient, too, but of course this game's outcome's overdetermined in Isabella's favor. Sadde spends twenty-eight minutes writhing and squirming and whimpering and moaning before she gives in and calls, "Oh please, ma'am-" She purses her lips immediately, but then it's too late.
"History's a biased account that makes the future look much more predictable and inevitable than it really is. Everything looks so obvious when there's this linear narrative except people living then had a billion other things to worry about that aren't mentioned in textbooks because they never ended up becoming relevant."
"I'm not trying to find people with whom to take over the world. Besides you. I'm trying to find people who I can email in ten years and go 'hey! Myeisha! How far did you get on fire element stuff? I found a think tank that needs some help and your time would be tax-deductible'."
"I mean, people specialize different amounts. It's kind of arbitrary that there is a popular amount for 'earth, air, fire, and water' and not a popular amount for 'magnetism, radioactive metals, grass, and mollusks' but she's not going to learn slower by specializing, she will learn fewer things faster."
"Well, when we met, you said you had a twin, and I thought, I wonder what a boy Isabella would look like, and then I was like, surely Alex looks nothing like a boy version of her, there's no reason for him to, but then my mind imagined two of you at the same time, and it went lovely places."
"Well, maybe funny's not the right word, but the thing I told her I imagined was something like 'unstoppable force meets immovable object.' She said they'd probably cooperate, though, so I'm imagining the two of them in a conference room discussing the fate of humanity."
"Should we found a country or colonize another planet?"
"Well, interplanetary travel and terraforming are prohibitively expensive if you don't already have a country."
"But on the other hand there's lots more real estate on Mars for an arbitrary number of countries."
"That still doesn't solve the underlying problem of needing funding."
"Of course, but is founding a country the best way to get it?'"