We?

"The Empire?"

"...Yes, that, sorry."

He was unclear and he's embarrassed about it! ...not very embarrassed, he's apparently too relaxed for it to last very long.

"I think– so Altarrin was there when the Empire was founded, right," this is safe to say because Caris probably knows even more of Altarrin's secrets than Bastran does, "and - I think he wanted to build - something different. Something better than this. I - think he's sad because it hasn't worked." 

These are all very stupid things to say but he snuggles up to Caris anyway, and says the even stupider thing. "Don't want him to have to be sad." 

"Yeah. He wanted - a place where everyone could grow up to be anything, and where they were rich, and happy, and free." Dangerous territory, this, but it's very important that Bastran never hear Caris sound afraid.

"...Mmmhmm. I think that's right - you know him better - but seems like how it should be. Right. If we're - being the place where civilization is - then that's what it's for. People being rich and happy and..." 

He apparently can't quite finish repeating the last word of whatever Caris just said. He's slightly upset about this but it's hard to be very upset when Caris is right there. 

Caris feels cold. "And free. Is how Good would usually finish that sentence. Rich and happy and free."

He's too tired for this conversation. He just wants to flop on Caris and not have to deal with any complicated messy problems that affect millions of people - he can't pretend they're not there but he can at least try to pretend that it's allowed for him to ignore them until tomorrow. Maybe. He's - not actually entirely clear what his mind means there, but he's also too tired for that can it not wait until later. Some better time.

"...Seems important too," he can say if he's too tired to think about the words he's saying. "Seems like Altarrin would've wanted - more. Of that."  

He doesn't want to die he doesn't want to die he doesn't want to die he doesn't want to prove the Emperor's advisors right he doesn't want to betray an implicit trust -

- he wants to make the compulsion go away and find out who Bastran is without it -

- he wants there to be one person in the fucking Empire who can think the thought 'people should be free' -

Put some numbers to things. How likely is Bastran to kill him. Extremely unlikely, actually, Caris could stand to have that specific panic button press itself a bit less readily. How likely is Bastran to feel betrayed, to feel there was some compact here that Caris violated -

- also...not ....that ....likely? He'll blame himself, is what he'll do, and Caris if Caris is still alive can talk him out of that.

- damn it, Caris had been hoping for the answers to those questions to be different so he would have an easy decision to make -

He puts his hand on Bastran's back, massages him deeply. "I'm going to cast a spell," he says soothingly, so the movement of mage-energy doesn't startle the Emperor, and then -

Dispel Magic. 

Bastran is VERY startled, actually! He goes rigid under Caris' hands, holding himself perfectly still, not even breathing. 

He hasn't been without compulsions since he was seven years old. (And even before that he was often under compulsions of one kind or another, because his father was of the school of parental discipline that considered them a reasonable and convenient method to ensure that his children attended their lessons and weren't embarrassingly rowdy at court functions.) He barely remembers what it was like, to not have nearly all of his thoughts and the vast majority of his motivation in some way built around an immutable duty to serve his Empire. 

It turns out that the thing it's like is awful. Like there's nothing there to stand on; like he shaped his whole life around the answer to a question and that question just stopped meaning anything at all. 

He's not angry. He's not even evaluating whether he feels betrayed, that's - not the part that matters - and he trusts Caris, he's not scared.

It's just - it feels like there should be a coherent thing left that is Bastran without compelled loyalties - it feels like even without compulsions he should still be capable of caring - but he's not sure there is, he's not sure there's anything left when you take away his life's work and everything he built it on. Just an aching emptiness, a void that he's spent his life papering over with lies that he tried to pretend were real. 

Stay in control stayincontrolstayincontrol it would be humiliating to cry in front of Caris, he wants Caris to like and admire him and be attracted to him and crying is so unattractive. But all his mental strategies for staying in control of his emotions are abruptly not working anymore, because he is apparently an idiot who runs most of his emotional regulation through duty to the Empire and now there's nothing there, just a negative space that should have a person in it and doesn't... 

He curls up and starts sobbing uncontrollably. 

- well that counts as...better than Altarrin's reaction, she's pretty sure, and much better than the plausible reaction of instantly summoning his guards with a contingency spell specifically designed for 'Caris tries something'.

What would Abrogail do - no, no, wrong question. Very rarely is that the right question. 

What would Keltham do - also probably the wrong question, though more broadly applicable.

He pulls the Emperor into his arms and gives himself Bull's Strength to hold him more tightly and says nothing at all, for a while.

Bastran clings and sobs and is for once too distracted to even be embarrassed about it. Being lost in confusing misery is not exactly an improvement on embarrassment but it's - simpler. 

He wants - something - he has absolutely no idea what or how to communicate it -

- he wants everything to stop, he wants to not feel like this, he wants to  be small and safe and no one important, he wants to go back and live his life over and run away from home before his father sent him to foster at court, before the Empire took him and turned him into a mask over hollow nothing, he wants to be a wandering minstrel in a place far away - he kind of wants to be dead, dead people don't have to run Empires, dead people can't fail at the only important thing they've ever done, and in this moment he's too overwhelmed to feel guilty about that thought - he wants it to not be his fault and he's not even sure what 'it' is - he wants Caris to say something that will make the world fit together again...

It's going to take him a while of being held to even slightly calm down. 

Caris is mindreading him. If nothing else got a bad reaction then that's probably not going to and he needs to - know what he's done - if he's going to fix it -

"When Keltham arrived," he says, eventually, "I could have walked away. It was the - first time in my life it was true, very close to the only time in my life it'd be true, but I was too - in the habit - of obedience, of loyalty, of - being the right shape -

In a lot of ways the most important virtue in the world was the ability to see that things could be different and reach for it when the door opened, right in front of me.

I didn't.

You did."

...He doesn't really feel like he did?? He nearly got Caris killed, he nearly got Altarrin killed and now Altarrin is miserable too, and Bastran hates making people he likes miserable but he can't see a way out of it. That doesn't result in thousands of people dying, at least, he could just not go back, and wow that's a pit of internal screaming, even though thinking about going back is also a differently-flavored pit of screaming. 

"I nearly got Altarrin killed, you had nothing to do with it. You could have decided to have me killed and you didn't, you could have decided to keep me enslaved and you didn't, you chose this instead. Altarrin is sad because he too is compulsioned to something he no longer thinks is helping people, and that's a stupid horrible system but you're not the one who created it, are you."

Huh. Bastran - hadn't really been thinking of that as a choice? ...He had on reflection been thinking of it as Caris just being powerful and scary enough to corner him into it. Which...he's not sure is true, and either way it's a lot more true because he signed off on Altarrin and Arbas' plan to make Caris more powerful. He...also hadn't really been thinking of that as his choice, more something that Altarrin backed him into...

...he's not sure why it apparently feels so important to his emotions that only the bad things that happened here are his doing. 

"You like it when I'm powerful and scary, and I like being powerful and scary, and I'm perfectly happy to keep things that way. But let's not actually get confused, please. You have at every moment of our acquaintance including right now had the right and the power to reshape me into something that does not threaten you and lock me away in a box somewhere to make you fancy hats. Altarrin can't stop you. No one else would even want to. Your life would probably be easier if you did. And you have chosen not to do that, because you're - 

- walking away from the Church of Asmodeus, once you found something that changes all the reasons you had for being there."

...He thinks it's a different sort of thing, to let Caris walk away?

Caris didn't - choose this - it's not his Empire, he didn't swear an oath of loyalty to it when he was fourteen - not that Bastran really could have not sworn that oath, he had at that point already been under loyalty compulsions half his life, but he did swear it and the Empire is his entire life and he continues to be unsure that there's anything left, if you take away all of the parts of him that are wrapped around serving the Empire. Caris clearly at least has other stuff going on. 

"I'm really not sure how choosing things works but I don't think the thing that happened to you counts. 

'm also not trying to convince you to walk away from the Empire. Probably in your place I'd end up staying. Just - for my reasons, not for reasons someone else twisted me into."

...right now it feels like he doesn't know what it would mean, to have his own reasons that aren't fundamentally a result of his life so far, which feels impossible to separate from the Empire. Where would reasons that are more his own reasons than those even come from. 

(His thoughts are not incredibly coherent at the moment, and are mostly full of a free-floating sourceless sense of Everything Is Terrible And It's His Fault. He feels trapped - somehow much more acutely than he did with the compulsion in place, which is stupid, surely - and his emotions are still repeatedly bringing up that he would stop being trapped if he were dead, which is even stupider and he almost wants his compulsion back so it can at least make that line of thought not-allowed. Though not entirely, because it also feels like maybe the structure he had built around it is already shattered and trying to mind-control himself into putting it back won't even work and - he needs to go back, even if it's not...to stay...he can't just vanish without a word and let the Empire fall into pointless civil war but also going back feels impossible.) 

"You can give it, like, twelve hours, I'm sure. You get more hours in the day than everyone else does anyway. You are absolutely not allowed to die, and I'll compulsion you to that effect if I need to.

I think I do see - traces of other reasons, other motivations - in you. You keep thinking about how many people will die if you don't go back."

...That's true. Even once he's untangled it from the sense that serving the Empire is inevitable and impossible to escape and the only thing about him that's ever mattered, he...still doesn't want people to die. 

It doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel at all like what Caris was trying to gesture at, before, at the way people can think and work when they're whole and happy and...free, he can think that too. This doesn't feel like freedom, it feels like being bound to a reality he hates, the power he never wanted but that he can't just refuse to use if it means people will die. 

But it does feel...real...and his. 

(It's helping a surprising amount, that Caris says he isn't allowed to die. Not wanting to disappoint Caris is doing at least as much work as a compulsion would, which is presumably exactly what Caris intended by saying it.) 

"If there were a spell that could make you happy, but it had to be powered by human sacrifice, a person a day, and it didn't make you better at your job, it didn't change your performance as Emperor at all, it just meant you were happy, would you want it?"

That shakes actual words out of him. "What?? No!!!! Who would do that???" 

" - lots of people! Plausibly most people, if it was set up such that they didn't really have to think about it!! But not you! Because you hate it when people die?"