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Um. I thought I'd vent a whole bundle of Boris and jäger feels at once, and then go calm down for a while? I think that would serve everyone. Yes. Heh.
Title: Love and Loyalty
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Girl Genius
Characters/Pairings: Boris Dolokhov, discussion of the jägers, Agatha, Klaus, and Lucrezia
Summary: On his way back to Castle Wulfenbach after meeting with the Jäger Generals, Boris indulges in a small panic attack over how badly this is all going to go wrong, how many ways it has already done wrong, and all the reasons they're going to keep going regardless. For all that he believes in the Empire, being part of it has never been easy
Wordcount: 3321
Warnings/Notes: Okay. Um. War, slavery, fear, panic, determination, moral dilemmas, moral compromise, sacrifice and a touch of hope
Disclaimer: Not mine
Title: Love and Loyalty
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Girl Genius
Characters/Pairings: Boris Dolokhov, discussion of the jägers, Agatha, Klaus, and Lucrezia
Summary: On his way back to Castle Wulfenbach after meeting with the Jäger Generals, Boris indulges in a small panic attack over how badly this is all going to go wrong, how many ways it has already done wrong, and all the reasons they're going to keep going regardless. For all that he believes in the Empire, being part of it has never been easy
Wordcount: 3321
Warnings/Notes: Okay. Um. War, slavery, fear, panic, determination, moral dilemmas, moral compromise, sacrifice and a touch of hope
Disclaimer: Not mine
Love and Loyalty
The transport ship was still waiting in the bay to return him to Castle Wulfenbach. Boris almost cried at the sight of it. He didn't, of course, that would have been very unprofessional and extremely undignified, but for a long moment he rather wanted to. It had been that kind of day, and to be honest he'd half expected Wooster to have done something to it, interfered with it somehow. If you're going to drop a man in fatal trouble, after all, why do things halfway?
But no. No. Either the blasted spy had slightly more honour than that, or the Jäger Generals did, but either way somebody had made sure he still had a way off this damned ship and back to something that resembled sanity.
Or not, all things considered, but in theory Castle Wulfenbach wasn't a potential warzone yet. It was maybe going to get there in short order, if things in Mechanicsburg blew up in their faces a bit more spectacularly than they'd already started doing now, but at least it shouldn't be quite there yet.
Oh god. He passed a hand across his face, ignoring the way it had started to shake, and hurriedly gave orders for the transport to get underway. He needed ... he needed a minute to think. That's what he needed. He had information to relay, he had reports to make, he had to get everyone prepared for ... for everything to go wrong, probably in the worst way possible, but first he had to sit down and he had to think.
And possibly have a panic attack first. Just for a minute. But really, that one had been building for a while now, and it was probably best to get it out of the way as well.
He found himself an alcove. The ship was a bit small for real privacy, but a nice corner out of sight and out of mind did just fine. He tucked himself in out of the way, pressed his back against the wall, and slid gently down it to sitting. Two of his arms went around his knees, the other two around his head. They were useful that way. They'd been useful that way from the start.
Treated effryvun like dey vos her servants. Treated der jägers like leedle petz -no- like dey vos property.
He shouldn't be thinking about that now. Of all possible things he should be worried about, things like, oh, having almost died just now, the Other having corrupted the Heterodyne girl, about the jägers leaving the Empire, about the clusterfuck about to happen in Mechanicsburg ... There were a great many things he ought to be thinking about this moment, all of them perfectly legitimate panic material. He should not be fixating, instead, on Goomblast's tirade.
But he was. He was, wasn't he? Of everything that had just happened, that rant was why he was shaking right now, that tirade was what had disturbed him the most. And he knew why, too.
The Other was coming back. It wasn't just a possibility, it wasn't just paranoia, it was real and it was confirmed. The Heterodyne girl, even if she wasn't purely the Other, was still part of her, confirmed even by her own people. That shouldn't make it any more real, not when the Baron had known already, but it did. To hear the jägers say it, to hear them ask for confirmation and receive it, made everything so much more real.
And they had. They'd asked. They hadn't just killed him, despite the fact that he'd been trying to kill their mistress, they hadn't just taken that damn blasted Wooster's word and thrown him off the airship without a parachute, they'd listened. They'd gone to the trouble of looking for confirmation.
And worse, they'd gotten it.
Twelve years. Twelve years of peace, and now the Other was back, and the threat of war and slavery had come with her. It was all going to happen again. Unless the Baron got his preemptive strike in, it was all coming back, and the jägers weren't likely to just sit still and let that preemptive strike happen. He'd seen it. They were loyal, they believed, honestly and truly, in their Heterodyne. They'd fight for her until the bitter end, Other or no Other, Baron or no Baron. Wooster had blown things wide open, and the chance for this to end cleanly was possibly already gone.
That meant war was coming. That meant the Other was in play once again, and if they didn't cage her right the first time, if they didn't manage to blast her from the face of the Earth, then it was all going to come back. The chaos. The war. The revenants.
The enslavement. All over again. Everything the Baron's Peace had abolished, everything it had protected against, all of it was coming back.
Little pets, Goomblast had said. The Other, Lucrezia, she had treated them like property. Like she owned them. And it had caught in Boris' mind, it had caught in his memory, because he remembered that. Didn't he. Not Lucrezia, not at her hands specifically, but he remembered slavery. Two arms, four, curled around his head. The jester's motley. Being remade, being rebuilt, the better to amuse his master. He remembered being property, yes. He remembered everything.
He hadn't had to. Not in so long. It had been different under the Baron, under the Empire. They'd made it different. He'd had a job, not for what he was, but for who he was. So many of them did. The Baron had picked them for who they were and what they could do, had made a space for them to work in, had made it safe for them to work. Not perfectly. Not always cleanly. Nothing was ever as clean as they wanted it be. There had been compromises without end, over and over again, but the difference was, the difference would always be, that they'd chosen to make them. They'd chosen. They'd been free to choose.
Love and loyalty. God, he'd never thought that one day he'd be feeling kinship with the jägers. He'd hated them. Mostly because they were boorish, violent, aggravatingly cheerful brutes that for some reason loved to poke at him, yes, but also because ... because he'd thought they were different. He thought they'd ... oh, he didn't know. Betrayed themselves. Chosen to bow before their Sparks because they hadn't a choice, and let themselves grow to like it. Been happy, because there were so many of them, because even owned they'd had each other. They'd come with the Baron, but they'd always held themselves separate. They always been waiting for their masters to come back, always willing to go back into servitude. Willing to break the Empire and all it stood for just for the sake of megalomaniac Sparks like all the other ones the Empire had fought, like all the others people like him had been rescued from. A Heterodyne. Any Heterodyne, good or evil, and be damned to the rest of the world.
He'd hated them. Or strongly disliked them, at the very least. He'd always felt that they were a betrayal waiting to happen, that they didn't understand the Empire, they didn't understand what it meant or why it mattered. He'd thought they didn't understand freedom anymore, and he'd hated them because of it.
BUT DER JÄGERS IZ NOT LEEDLE PETZ! Der jägers vill not be forced! Ve vill neffer submit to soch a ting!
He'd been wrong, apparently. He'd been wrong about them from the start. The jägerdraught was taken willingly, and it wasn't just ... it wasn't a pretty face they put on top of their slavery, it wasn't pandering to the masters, it was something they believed in. It was something they took pride in, something they were willing to fight for when someone came along that wanted to strip it from them. They would wait out bad masters, they had all the time in the world, but someone trying to usurp those masters, someone trying to crawl inside their heads and own them and force them ... that they would fight against. Out of love and out of loyalty. Because they believed.
And cruelty of cruelties, the fact that they believed was what was going to lead them against him. Against the Baron, against the Empire. They were going to fight for their freedom, but they were going to fight against him. Because the Other had taken their Heterodyne, but had left them hope to get her back. The blasted girl had given them hope, given them something to fight for, and because of that they were going to let everything fall on the chance their mistress might be saved.
Loyalty. It all hinged on loyalty. They were going to fight him out of loyalty to their Heterodyne, and he was ... he was going to fight them, he was going to have to, out of loyalty to his Empire. The Other was the enemy, the Other was sitting there in their precious Heterodyne's head, and it didn't matter, because loyalty mattered first. All the world could burn, but loyalty mattered first. Goddammit. Goddammit it all.
Because he couldn't not fight. He couldn't just sit there and trust the way they did, not in some girl who didn't have the first clue what she was dealing with. He couldn't trust that 'love' was going to magically provide the inspiration to destroy a monstrosity. Love was what had gotten them into this mess! Even if it was strong enough, even if young romance counted halfway as a motivation, it was the wrong one. It was too messy, it was too emotional, it was sloppy and ... and stupid and ...
It was going to go wrong. All of it. The jägers were going to leave the Empire, Mechanicsburg was going to either be destroyed or go to war, and if for one second anyone slipped, if for one second they let their guard down, the Other was going to escape and bring war and death and slavery back to Europa. Everything he'd escaped from, everything he'd helped build an Empire to protect against, it was all going to come back.
Unless they stopped it. Unless they fought it. The Baron would. The Baron would fight the Other with everything he had, Boris believed that down to his bones. Loyalty, maybe. Love. But also belief. Also trust. He knew the Baron would fight first, hardest and last.
But not alone. Never alone.
The Empire wasn't just the Baron. He was ... he was the centre of it, he was everything to it, they believed in him, but he wasn't all it was. It wasn't just Sparks. It wasn't a monument to one Spark's vanity and strength and willful conquest. If it had been that, Boris would never have fought for it. Not willingly. He'd have been forced, maybe, he'd have been enslaved, but he would never have given it all he had. He'd never have given it everything. The Empire was about more than Klaus Wulfenbach. It was about Boris too. It was about everyone, all of them that had found freedom in it, all of them that had made something new and different and safe out of the ruins of the Other War and all the depravities that had followed afterwards. The Empire was their shield and their sword against what had gone before, and they would fight for it.
They had to. They weren't ever going back to what had come before. If any of them could help it, if any of them had a choice, they were never going back.
And they'd do more than fight for it, he thought. Lifting his head out of the cradle of his arms, leaning it back against the metal of the wall instead. They were going to do more than fight. They were going to kill, weren't they. Not just the Castle. Not just the Other. They were going to kill the Heterodyne too. She might even be innocent, she might even be fighting, and they were going to kill her anyway. And, in all probability, the jägers along with her.
Because they weren't going to surrender. The Heterodyne was not going to come to the Baron. The jägers were not going to stand politely by and let their home and their Heterodyne be melted into slag. Mechanicsburg might be crippled, but it wasn't going to go down without a fight. People were going to die. Uselessly, pointlessly, but they were going to die, and Boris was going to help do the killing.
Love and loyalty. For god's sake. How could anyone think it was a solution, hmm? How could anyone think it had a chance?
He wished ... he wished he hadn't known what they believed in, first. The jägers. He wished he hadn't realised what they were, what they fought for, why they fought for it. He didn't want to know they wanted freedom before he took it from them. He didn't want to understand they fought for love before he helped destroy everything they held dear. He didn't want to know that they'd been there, that they'd been property too, that they'd been willing to fight against it. He could have destroyed monsters, brutes who'd grown happy in their slavery and never thought outside it. He still wouldn't have liked it, but it would have been easier to bear. When he had to do it regardless, it would have been so much easier not to have understood them first.
But he did. He did. He knew all about bowing by choice. He knew about taking an oath, taking a bond, out of hope and out of loyalty, out of a belief that this was someone worth serving. He knew about fighting for them, about being willing to die for them. Hah! He knew about being willing to beat up jägers and walk alone into enemy territory to try and trick them long enough to kill their masters, knowing full well what would happen if the deception fell through. Oh yes. He knew about giving a life willingly.
Effry vun ov us reached out our hands und took der jägerdraught by choice. Und ve got der goot end ov der deal, hyu bet ve did! Ve serve our Heterodynes freely, out of luff und loyalty, und our Heterodynes haff alvays earned dot!
Yes, Boris thought, squeezing his arms around his knees, grinning fiercely in something close to hysteria. Yes, maybe you did, maybe they did, but that was before the Other. That was before she took your Heterodyne, that was before she tried to destroy my Baron and my Empire, that was before it all went wrong. Maybe you serve her willingly, but she's not going to save you. She's too young, she's too untried, she hasn't a hope. She won't stop the Other. She won't be able to. And then we'll kill her, we'll have to, and when you fight us, we'll have to kill you.
And I don't want to, he thought. I don't want to. But I chose my Baron too. I reached out my hands, all four of them, and I chose him out of love and loyalty, and if it comes down to it I'll kill you for his sake. For his Empire's sake. For mine. Because I can't make any other choice.
That was what the Other did. That was what she was. She took the choices away. Even before her wasps, even before she paralysed your will and left you helpless inside your own body to watch while she used it, she took the choices away. She made you fight when you didn't want to, she made you kill when you didn't want to, she made enemies of people who had no reason to be. She made you kill everything you loved, because everything you loved had been turned against you.
And that was why ... That was why, even knowing that he didn't want to do this, he was still going to. Even if it cost them everything, they were going to fight. The jägers weren't the only ones who would never submit, who would never let themselves. It was worth dying, to stop something like the Other. It was worth killing. It was worth breaking the Empire open if it came to it, if it was that or let her have it. Against something like the Other, against what she did and what she made of people, there was no sacrifice too great.
They couldn't go back. They couldn't be owned again. They couldn't be enslaved. For all these years, they'd fought never to have to suffer that again, and they would keep fighting. They would fight and die until there was nothing left. Not even for the Baron, not even for the Empire, but for what the Empire meant. For what it had come to mean to them all.
Freedom. A servitude not forced but willingly given. The capacity and opportunity to choose your fate. Not always from good options, not always in good circumstances, but even still. Choice existed, choice could be fought for, and that was more freedom than some of them had ever hoped to see, once upon a time.
It was more than he'd hoped. When a master could come and remake your body on a whim, throw you together as he pleased for his own amusement, hold you up as a prized possession to be admired for his skill in making you ... No. He hadn't hoped. Not until Klaus Wulfenbach. Not until the Baron and the Baron's Peace. Not until his Empire.
It was too late to go back. As long as the Other existed, as long as she had the Heterodyne, it was too late to go back. Someone was going to die because of this, and someone was going to have to do the killing. Unless some miracle happened, unless someone pulled a solution out of thin air, people were going to die.
The jägers thought their Heterodyne could produce that miracle. Somehow, a little bit, Boris hoped that maybe the Baron might come up with something either. Some way to stop it, some way to keep the Other down before they had to break something that couldn't be unbroken. For all that they stood on opposite sides of the line the Other had made, maybe both he and the jägers hoped for that.
And god, he thought, scrubbing two hands wearily through his hair while he pushed himself up with the other two, god he hoped that one of them at least would be right. He'd take the jägers over the Other any day. Maybe even the Heterodyne. It had to count for something that the jägers would fight the Other to the death, but choose this Agatha willingly. It mightn't count for much, but it had to count for something.
Because if it didn't, they were all going to bleed before this was through. At the very least, they were going to bleed.
"Docking with the Castle, sir!" somebody called back to him from up front, and Boris took a deep breath. And a few more, for good measure. He twitched his clothing back into an approximation of order, fussing slightly at the damaged sleeve, and tried to remember what 'cool and collected' felt like. Or, failing that, at least something slightly better than 'in the midst of a morbid panic attack'. He had an Empire to help run. For however long they had one left, he had to run it, and he was damn well going to.
If the world had ever been nice enough to stop for debilitating moral crises, after all, there would never have been a need for an Empire in the first place.
Heaven help them all. For god's sake, somebody had to.
A/N: Goomblast's whole speech, especially "VE IZ NOT LEEDLE PETZ!" kind of hit me right in the gut, and only more so given who he was talking to. So. Um. You get this?
The transport ship was still waiting in the bay to return him to Castle Wulfenbach. Boris almost cried at the sight of it. He didn't, of course, that would have been very unprofessional and extremely undignified, but for a long moment he rather wanted to. It had been that kind of day, and to be honest he'd half expected Wooster to have done something to it, interfered with it somehow. If you're going to drop a man in fatal trouble, after all, why do things halfway?
But no. No. Either the blasted spy had slightly more honour than that, or the Jäger Generals did, but either way somebody had made sure he still had a way off this damned ship and back to something that resembled sanity.
Or not, all things considered, but in theory Castle Wulfenbach wasn't a potential warzone yet. It was maybe going to get there in short order, if things in Mechanicsburg blew up in their faces a bit more spectacularly than they'd already started doing now, but at least it shouldn't be quite there yet.
Oh god. He passed a hand across his face, ignoring the way it had started to shake, and hurriedly gave orders for the transport to get underway. He needed ... he needed a minute to think. That's what he needed. He had information to relay, he had reports to make, he had to get everyone prepared for ... for everything to go wrong, probably in the worst way possible, but first he had to sit down and he had to think.
And possibly have a panic attack first. Just for a minute. But really, that one had been building for a while now, and it was probably best to get it out of the way as well.
He found himself an alcove. The ship was a bit small for real privacy, but a nice corner out of sight and out of mind did just fine. He tucked himself in out of the way, pressed his back against the wall, and slid gently down it to sitting. Two of his arms went around his knees, the other two around his head. They were useful that way. They'd been useful that way from the start.
Treated effryvun like dey vos her servants. Treated der jägers like leedle petz -no- like dey vos property.
He shouldn't be thinking about that now. Of all possible things he should be worried about, things like, oh, having almost died just now, the Other having corrupted the Heterodyne girl, about the jägers leaving the Empire, about the clusterfuck about to happen in Mechanicsburg ... There were a great many things he ought to be thinking about this moment, all of them perfectly legitimate panic material. He should not be fixating, instead, on Goomblast's tirade.
But he was. He was, wasn't he? Of everything that had just happened, that rant was why he was shaking right now, that tirade was what had disturbed him the most. And he knew why, too.
The Other was coming back. It wasn't just a possibility, it wasn't just paranoia, it was real and it was confirmed. The Heterodyne girl, even if she wasn't purely the Other, was still part of her, confirmed even by her own people. That shouldn't make it any more real, not when the Baron had known already, but it did. To hear the jägers say it, to hear them ask for confirmation and receive it, made everything so much more real.
And they had. They'd asked. They hadn't just killed him, despite the fact that he'd been trying to kill their mistress, they hadn't just taken that damn blasted Wooster's word and thrown him off the airship without a parachute, they'd listened. They'd gone to the trouble of looking for confirmation.
And worse, they'd gotten it.
Twelve years. Twelve years of peace, and now the Other was back, and the threat of war and slavery had come with her. It was all going to happen again. Unless the Baron got his preemptive strike in, it was all coming back, and the jägers weren't likely to just sit still and let that preemptive strike happen. He'd seen it. They were loyal, they believed, honestly and truly, in their Heterodyne. They'd fight for her until the bitter end, Other or no Other, Baron or no Baron. Wooster had blown things wide open, and the chance for this to end cleanly was possibly already gone.
That meant war was coming. That meant the Other was in play once again, and if they didn't cage her right the first time, if they didn't manage to blast her from the face of the Earth, then it was all going to come back. The chaos. The war. The revenants.
The enslavement. All over again. Everything the Baron's Peace had abolished, everything it had protected against, all of it was coming back.
Little pets, Goomblast had said. The Other, Lucrezia, she had treated them like property. Like she owned them. And it had caught in Boris' mind, it had caught in his memory, because he remembered that. Didn't he. Not Lucrezia, not at her hands specifically, but he remembered slavery. Two arms, four, curled around his head. The jester's motley. Being remade, being rebuilt, the better to amuse his master. He remembered being property, yes. He remembered everything.
He hadn't had to. Not in so long. It had been different under the Baron, under the Empire. They'd made it different. He'd had a job, not for what he was, but for who he was. So many of them did. The Baron had picked them for who they were and what they could do, had made a space for them to work in, had made it safe for them to work. Not perfectly. Not always cleanly. Nothing was ever as clean as they wanted it be. There had been compromises without end, over and over again, but the difference was, the difference would always be, that they'd chosen to make them. They'd chosen. They'd been free to choose.
Love and loyalty. God, he'd never thought that one day he'd be feeling kinship with the jägers. He'd hated them. Mostly because they were boorish, violent, aggravatingly cheerful brutes that for some reason loved to poke at him, yes, but also because ... because he'd thought they were different. He thought they'd ... oh, he didn't know. Betrayed themselves. Chosen to bow before their Sparks because they hadn't a choice, and let themselves grow to like it. Been happy, because there were so many of them, because even owned they'd had each other. They'd come with the Baron, but they'd always held themselves separate. They always been waiting for their masters to come back, always willing to go back into servitude. Willing to break the Empire and all it stood for just for the sake of megalomaniac Sparks like all the other ones the Empire had fought, like all the others people like him had been rescued from. A Heterodyne. Any Heterodyne, good or evil, and be damned to the rest of the world.
He'd hated them. Or strongly disliked them, at the very least. He'd always felt that they were a betrayal waiting to happen, that they didn't understand the Empire, they didn't understand what it meant or why it mattered. He'd thought they didn't understand freedom anymore, and he'd hated them because of it.
BUT DER JÄGERS IZ NOT LEEDLE PETZ! Der jägers vill not be forced! Ve vill neffer submit to soch a ting!
He'd been wrong, apparently. He'd been wrong about them from the start. The jägerdraught was taken willingly, and it wasn't just ... it wasn't a pretty face they put on top of their slavery, it wasn't pandering to the masters, it was something they believed in. It was something they took pride in, something they were willing to fight for when someone came along that wanted to strip it from them. They would wait out bad masters, they had all the time in the world, but someone trying to usurp those masters, someone trying to crawl inside their heads and own them and force them ... that they would fight against. Out of love and out of loyalty. Because they believed.
And cruelty of cruelties, the fact that they believed was what was going to lead them against him. Against the Baron, against the Empire. They were going to fight for their freedom, but they were going to fight against him. Because the Other had taken their Heterodyne, but had left them hope to get her back. The blasted girl had given them hope, given them something to fight for, and because of that they were going to let everything fall on the chance their mistress might be saved.
Loyalty. It all hinged on loyalty. They were going to fight him out of loyalty to their Heterodyne, and he was ... he was going to fight them, he was going to have to, out of loyalty to his Empire. The Other was the enemy, the Other was sitting there in their precious Heterodyne's head, and it didn't matter, because loyalty mattered first. All the world could burn, but loyalty mattered first. Goddammit. Goddammit it all.
Because he couldn't not fight. He couldn't just sit there and trust the way they did, not in some girl who didn't have the first clue what she was dealing with. He couldn't trust that 'love' was going to magically provide the inspiration to destroy a monstrosity. Love was what had gotten them into this mess! Even if it was strong enough, even if young romance counted halfway as a motivation, it was the wrong one. It was too messy, it was too emotional, it was sloppy and ... and stupid and ...
It was going to go wrong. All of it. The jägers were going to leave the Empire, Mechanicsburg was going to either be destroyed or go to war, and if for one second anyone slipped, if for one second they let their guard down, the Other was going to escape and bring war and death and slavery back to Europa. Everything he'd escaped from, everything he'd helped build an Empire to protect against, it was all going to come back.
Unless they stopped it. Unless they fought it. The Baron would. The Baron would fight the Other with everything he had, Boris believed that down to his bones. Loyalty, maybe. Love. But also belief. Also trust. He knew the Baron would fight first, hardest and last.
But not alone. Never alone.
The Empire wasn't just the Baron. He was ... he was the centre of it, he was everything to it, they believed in him, but he wasn't all it was. It wasn't just Sparks. It wasn't a monument to one Spark's vanity and strength and willful conquest. If it had been that, Boris would never have fought for it. Not willingly. He'd have been forced, maybe, he'd have been enslaved, but he would never have given it all he had. He'd never have given it everything. The Empire was about more than Klaus Wulfenbach. It was about Boris too. It was about everyone, all of them that had found freedom in it, all of them that had made something new and different and safe out of the ruins of the Other War and all the depravities that had followed afterwards. The Empire was their shield and their sword against what had gone before, and they would fight for it.
They had to. They weren't ever going back to what had come before. If any of them could help it, if any of them had a choice, they were never going back.
And they'd do more than fight for it, he thought. Lifting his head out of the cradle of his arms, leaning it back against the metal of the wall instead. They were going to do more than fight. They were going to kill, weren't they. Not just the Castle. Not just the Other. They were going to kill the Heterodyne too. She might even be innocent, she might even be fighting, and they were going to kill her anyway. And, in all probability, the jägers along with her.
Because they weren't going to surrender. The Heterodyne was not going to come to the Baron. The jägers were not going to stand politely by and let their home and their Heterodyne be melted into slag. Mechanicsburg might be crippled, but it wasn't going to go down without a fight. People were going to die. Uselessly, pointlessly, but they were going to die, and Boris was going to help do the killing.
Love and loyalty. For god's sake. How could anyone think it was a solution, hmm? How could anyone think it had a chance?
He wished ... he wished he hadn't known what they believed in, first. The jägers. He wished he hadn't realised what they were, what they fought for, why they fought for it. He didn't want to know they wanted freedom before he took it from them. He didn't want to understand they fought for love before he helped destroy everything they held dear. He didn't want to know that they'd been there, that they'd been property too, that they'd been willing to fight against it. He could have destroyed monsters, brutes who'd grown happy in their slavery and never thought outside it. He still wouldn't have liked it, but it would have been easier to bear. When he had to do it regardless, it would have been so much easier not to have understood them first.
But he did. He did. He knew all about bowing by choice. He knew about taking an oath, taking a bond, out of hope and out of loyalty, out of a belief that this was someone worth serving. He knew about fighting for them, about being willing to die for them. Hah! He knew about being willing to beat up jägers and walk alone into enemy territory to try and trick them long enough to kill their masters, knowing full well what would happen if the deception fell through. Oh yes. He knew about giving a life willingly.
Effry vun ov us reached out our hands und took der jägerdraught by choice. Und ve got der goot end ov der deal, hyu bet ve did! Ve serve our Heterodynes freely, out of luff und loyalty, und our Heterodynes haff alvays earned dot!
Yes, Boris thought, squeezing his arms around his knees, grinning fiercely in something close to hysteria. Yes, maybe you did, maybe they did, but that was before the Other. That was before she took your Heterodyne, that was before she tried to destroy my Baron and my Empire, that was before it all went wrong. Maybe you serve her willingly, but she's not going to save you. She's too young, she's too untried, she hasn't a hope. She won't stop the Other. She won't be able to. And then we'll kill her, we'll have to, and when you fight us, we'll have to kill you.
And I don't want to, he thought. I don't want to. But I chose my Baron too. I reached out my hands, all four of them, and I chose him out of love and loyalty, and if it comes down to it I'll kill you for his sake. For his Empire's sake. For mine. Because I can't make any other choice.
That was what the Other did. That was what she was. She took the choices away. Even before her wasps, even before she paralysed your will and left you helpless inside your own body to watch while she used it, she took the choices away. She made you fight when you didn't want to, she made you kill when you didn't want to, she made enemies of people who had no reason to be. She made you kill everything you loved, because everything you loved had been turned against you.
And that was why ... That was why, even knowing that he didn't want to do this, he was still going to. Even if it cost them everything, they were going to fight. The jägers weren't the only ones who would never submit, who would never let themselves. It was worth dying, to stop something like the Other. It was worth killing. It was worth breaking the Empire open if it came to it, if it was that or let her have it. Against something like the Other, against what she did and what she made of people, there was no sacrifice too great.
They couldn't go back. They couldn't be owned again. They couldn't be enslaved. For all these years, they'd fought never to have to suffer that again, and they would keep fighting. They would fight and die until there was nothing left. Not even for the Baron, not even for the Empire, but for what the Empire meant. For what it had come to mean to them all.
Freedom. A servitude not forced but willingly given. The capacity and opportunity to choose your fate. Not always from good options, not always in good circumstances, but even still. Choice existed, choice could be fought for, and that was more freedom than some of them had ever hoped to see, once upon a time.
It was more than he'd hoped. When a master could come and remake your body on a whim, throw you together as he pleased for his own amusement, hold you up as a prized possession to be admired for his skill in making you ... No. He hadn't hoped. Not until Klaus Wulfenbach. Not until the Baron and the Baron's Peace. Not until his Empire.
It was too late to go back. As long as the Other existed, as long as she had the Heterodyne, it was too late to go back. Someone was going to die because of this, and someone was going to have to do the killing. Unless some miracle happened, unless someone pulled a solution out of thin air, people were going to die.
The jägers thought their Heterodyne could produce that miracle. Somehow, a little bit, Boris hoped that maybe the Baron might come up with something either. Some way to stop it, some way to keep the Other down before they had to break something that couldn't be unbroken. For all that they stood on opposite sides of the line the Other had made, maybe both he and the jägers hoped for that.
And god, he thought, scrubbing two hands wearily through his hair while he pushed himself up with the other two, god he hoped that one of them at least would be right. He'd take the jägers over the Other any day. Maybe even the Heterodyne. It had to count for something that the jägers would fight the Other to the death, but choose this Agatha willingly. It mightn't count for much, but it had to count for something.
Because if it didn't, they were all going to bleed before this was through. At the very least, they were going to bleed.
"Docking with the Castle, sir!" somebody called back to him from up front, and Boris took a deep breath. And a few more, for good measure. He twitched his clothing back into an approximation of order, fussing slightly at the damaged sleeve, and tried to remember what 'cool and collected' felt like. Or, failing that, at least something slightly better than 'in the midst of a morbid panic attack'. He had an Empire to help run. For however long they had one left, he had to run it, and he was damn well going to.
If the world had ever been nice enough to stop for debilitating moral crises, after all, there would never have been a need for an Empire in the first place.
Heaven help them all. For god's sake, somebody had to.
A/N: Goomblast's whole speech, especially "VE IZ NOT LEEDLE PETZ!" kind of hit me right in the gut, and only more so given who he was talking to. So. Um. You get this?
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