Tragic Backstory

More like a tragic scenario I'm using to justify this downside but I'm writing more than most of you lazy assholes are so here is my reward

The Story

The assignment came down on a Tuesday.

Truxtun received it the way he received everything in those years: Bright eyed, motivated, and eager to perform. He was a Lieutenant Commander then, twenty-six years old, and the promotions coming at a pace that generated the particular kind of resentment among peers that a man either notices and addresses or notices and ignores. Truxtun ignored it, like he usually does. He had no energy for peer politics. He had training schedules and unit readiness reports and a personal training regimen that started before sunrise and ended after dark. His orders? Escort and close-security duty for Saint Jervoux on a voyage, 5 months. Even Truxtun thought that was a long ass voyage. He felt his own nerves creep up for the first time in his life. Celestial Dragons, to him, were something that he only casually read about in his books. The fact he was to be in personal distance of one had him form sweat on his forehead. His only thoughts: I will not bring shame upon myself, and the service. He reported fourteen days later exactly 30 minutes early. That is where he met the Celestial Dragon.

Saint Jervoux was forty-three years old, fat in the way of men whose appetites have never once encountered a limit, and he descended the gangplank to meet his escort detail wearing a robe that cost more than the annual salary of everyone in Truxtun's unit combined, a bubble helmet sitting on his head, and an expression of bored ownership that Truxtun recognized and catalogued as the face of a god at rest. He had rehearsed this meeting in his mind. He had prepared himself for the proximity to divinity. He had read every available text on Celestial Dragon protocol, and etiquette. Saint Jervoux looked at Truxtun's jaw, at the MARINE tattoo running across it, and laughed for approximately fifteen seconds. Truxtun, never having been in this scenario, fell back to what he always did in times of uncertainty. He stood at attention and let the laughter continue.

That was the first of many lessons on this voyage. The laughter was not cruelty. It was weather. You did not take offense at weather. You stood in it. Or so Truxtun told himself.

The ship was three times the length of any Marine vessel Truxtun had served on, hung with silk and gold fixtures and crewed by slaves. Each one marked with the Celestial Dragon's household brand on the left collarbone, each one moving with careful grace of people who have learned that existing visibly is dangerous. Truxtun had known, in the abstract, that the Celestial Dragons kept slaves. Knowing in documents is not the same as watching a woman flinch every time a man's shadow crosses her path. It was not the same as when Truxtun was ordered to beat these very slaves for the amusement of the Saint, regularly. It was not the same when the slaves then began to fear Truxtun's shadow. He filed these events under divine prerogative and moved to his post.

Saint Jervoux was, in the first week, merely disgusting. He ate obscene amounts, he spoke about the lesser beings of the world with the casual interest of a man describing insects, he demanded performances from his slaves at dinner that Truxtun watched from his post at the dining room door with his hands at his sides and his jaw set and his eyes at the middle distance. The classic military look and mental state that is not quite anywhere and is not quite witnessing anything. He had four Fishmen in a tank beside the dining table. The saint had Truxtun feed them irregularly and poke them with a long stick when conversation slowed. The saint called this "keeping the mood light". The saint's guests always found it amusing to see the fishmen squirm. Truxtun did not. Truxtun forced himself to learn to enjoy this act, or else he would break. He had been taught that the Celestial Dragons were the direct bloodline of the founders of the world. That the twenty kings who had created the World Government and relinquished their thrones had done so in an act of cosmic authority that divinity was not metaphor but a real fact. The Gorosei sat at the top of the hierarchy as its administrators, yes, but the Celestial Dragons were its blood, and blood could not be wrong, only misread by those too small to understand the frame of the truth they were looking through. He was beginning to understand the frame.

The second week was the week of the hunt.

Saint Jervoux had a collection of twelve people: slaves of various ages and origins, two of them Fishmen, one of them a child of perhaps nine years. Quarry, the Saint called them. The hunt happened on the third morning of the second week, on the main deck, cleared of all other crew. They were given a thirty-second head start. Saint Jervoux used a rifle. He took each shot with the precision of a man for which missing has never been a consequence he's had to process. He simply shot again if he missed, perhaps pausing to take a puff of his rather large cigar.

Truxtun stood at the rail and watched.

He did not watch the Saint. He watched his own hands, resting on the rail, perfectly still. He made them stay still. He forced himself to get lost in thought about Rokushiki forms. He counted steps, felt the imaginary friction-drop under his imaginary feet, let the technical occupy the part of his mind that would otherwise have been doing something he was not going to permit it to do.

A snap in Truxtun's ever growing absent-mindedness . A thought formed: The child ran the fastest. Children do.

Forcing the cloud back over his mind, He ran through every Rankyaku variant he knew. He counted the kick sequences.

Another snap, Truxtun's thoughts broken by the sound of the rifle. The child figure, no more than a shadow at this point, crumpled to the ground.

He stood at the rail with perfectly still hands.

That night, alone in the security detail's quarters. There, he assembled a structure in his mind. He had always been good at structures, at finding the load-bearing column, or foundation, of an idea and understanding how the whole thing was held up.

The load-bearing column was this: a lesser creature's discomfort in the presence of divine action is the lesser creature's own limitation, not the divine action's error. The pain he was not acknowledging (because it was not there, he was filing it correctly) was the pain of insufficient comprehension. He was too small for the view. His own frame was too narrow. If he could widen the frame enough, THINK like a divine being, the things he had watched today would form into their correct shape, which was the shape of how the world actually was, which was the shape of the truth. The only shape that mattered

He widened the frame. A thicker cloud fell over his mind.

He stood up, checked his uniform, and went back on duty.

The third week brought a woman named Petty Officer Sands.

Sands part of Truxtun's security detail. She had been managing the first two weeks the same way the rest of the detail had been managing them silence, and a forward focus. Truxtun had watched her. Sands was bending, not breaking. Bending was acceptable. Bending was normal. Breaking is not to be tolerated. The night of the third week's fourth day, Saint Jervoux decided he wanted entertainment of a particular kind from one of his slaves. Truxtun was at his post outside the cabin door. He heard what was happening inside. He did not move from his post, because his post was his post, and abandoning a post was not something he did, and the sounds coming through the door were not something that required a response, because what happened behind that door was between a god and his property and the correct theological framework for that —

Sands moved. Truxtun, himself, felt his body automatically move as well. He has never felt this speed, since. She was three feet toward the door before Truxtun's hand closed on her arm with a grip that had iron behind it.

"Return to your post, petty officer." Truxtun said bluntly. The cloud over his mind clearing ever so faintly in this time of conflict.

Sands stared at him. There was something happening in Sands' face that Truxtun recognized and could not afford to look at directly, so he looked at Sands' collar instead, where her collar insignia was a whole centimeter off. Something to focus on.

"Sir, she's—"

"Return. To your post."

"Commander Truxtun, with respect, we can't just—"

"We are not just anything." Truxtun said with a flatness. "We are the security detail for a Celestial Dragon on an authorized voyage. That is the precise and total description of what WE are in this moment. You will return to your post, you will stand at your post, and we will never have this conversation again."

Sands' mouth opened, maybe to formulate a response but Truxton was quicker, "And fix your fucking collar device, petty officer."

Sands moved back to her post, fixed her device, and stood silent. Truxtun could hear a muffled, almost teary sound from Sands. The noises of the room creep back into his mind. Truxtun went back to his own post, his own position. Lost in his own thoughts, even with his mind's haze, he felt a muffled, almost teary feeling from his own eyes. He expanded the frame. He widened it until the sound coming through the door was as distant as weather. He counted. He stood perfectly still with his hands at his sides and his shoes immaculate on the polished deck and the MARINE tattoo sitting across his jaw like a statement of absolute fact. He never once permitted himself to think about whether Sands was right.

Because if Sands was right, the column came down. And if the column came down, everything resting on it came down too and every choice he had ever made and every morning he had ever gotten up and pressed his uniform and reported to his post and served, SERVED, meant that he served something that was actively destruct--

Truxtun paused. He widened the frame in his mind. A thicker cloud came down over his thoughts. He stood at his post.

The fruit came at the voyage's end, as recorded. Saint Jervoux, apparently entertained by his escort commander's eight weeks of absolute granite composure, opened the lacquered chest and offered the Soap-Soap Fruit with the throwaway generosity of a man clearing a shelf.

Truxtun accepted it with both hands and the precise forty-five-degree bow of formal gratitude specified in Celestial Dragon protocol.

He ate it that night on the return voyage.

What Truxton took back from that voyage was not trauma. Truxtun would never apply such a weak word to himself, even at his lowest point. No, what Truxtun took back with him was an understanding. A new, calcified, column took root in his very psyche which helped him understand the very nature of the world he lived in, and the very nature of hierarchy itself. A frame so wide it was almost blinding, his mind unable to comprehend just how expansive his own justifications had come to cloud his once clear, and pristine, train of thought.

What he took back was a strict reverence to control, and just how important it is to keep in your life. A man who has stood perfectly still for five months. A man whose entire frame had been destroyed and restructured finds that when he gets home, the things he can control become very, very important to him. Maybe not emotionally important (Truxtun himself admits he had not been emotional since the third week of that voyage). It was important to him in the way that foundations to a building are important. It was necessary to think like this. Good Order and Discipline are the only thing that can keep a man sane in the face of the unknown.

This importance placed on control, discipline, and its offshoots made him a damn fine officer. The best anyone who has served with him, or under him, would say with pride. Though, something within Truxtun was lost in the seas of that assignment. Truxtun couldn't remember the last time he questioned orders, or really, questioned anything at all.