Why Didn't You Tell Me to Stop
"Your Majesty, how can you simply seize Her Majesty the Empress like that!"
At the rebuke, Hyperion bowed his head lower still.
Without restraint.
Yes. The words fit him exactly.
He had taken his wife in a blind frenzy, never once noticing how hard it was for her, or how much it hurt.
"Good heavens. She must have been in such pain, to faint like that... Haah. And it being her first time, she would have been all the more tense..."
He said nothing to the scolding that followed. He only worried one finger against another.
A faint sense of injustice stirred in him. If she had been tense because it was her first time, then so had he.
He could not have said in what state of mind he had worked through the day. He had stared at the documents, certainly, but the letters refused to settle into his eyes, until Signo, standing at his side, heaved sigh after heavy sigh as if determined that Hyperion should hear every one of them. Again and again his shaking hand dropped the pen and fumbled it back up. Once, out of nowhere, he had flushed scarlet with no one else in the room.
The day had been a shambles.
And the nearer evening drew, the harder his heart knocked against his ribs.
When the last of his duties was done and he returned to the Main Palace, he caught sight of a room still lit, and the corner of his mouth lifted before he could stop it.
His wife was there. The wife whose hand he had not even properly held in three years.
Hyperion hurried to his own chamber and washed. He was careful of cleanliness as a rule, but tonight he scrubbed until it seemed he might scour the very hide from his body.
All she has ever seen of me is filth.
Better than anyone, he knew what a wreck he was on those rare returns to the Imperial Palace, once every few months. Dried mud caked to his skin. Bloodstains that would not come clean no matter how he washed. A body run so long and so hard that he was scarcely fit to be seen. Even so, Laniakea had never once spoken a word of distaste. She had only gone white at the sight of the blood.
Next time, I ought to kill them so the blood spatters less.
Uninvited guests found their way to Hyperion now and then. Even so, a guest was a guest, and he always offered a welcome suited to the man: a head, or a pair of legs. He was less fond of a thrust to the belly. The stench was appalling.
But there had been one guest, only once, whom he sent back alive. It was the day a knight returned from the patronage banquet he had been ordered to attend.
No one wanted to go, so they drew lots, and the loser went. The man was meant to come back as he always did, face twisted in distaste, and hand over the gold coins the nobles had flung at him in mockery.
"Your Highness. I was given this."
The knight held out a handkerchief.
On the ruined battlefields of the Northern Border, a handkerchief of pure, soft white was a profoundly alien thing. Hyperion stared at it with cold eyes. It was unmistakably of the imperial household, and anything from that quarter was as good as poison to him. He was about to order it thrown out, certain the Empress had been up to some petty scheme again, when he saw the embroidery in one corner.
Whenever the Empress set a stitch, she always worked the imperial crest proudly beside the crest of her own house. But the handkerchief the knight had brought bore only a single initial.
For a moment he wondered whose it was. Then his mind found the one person bound to him who carried that initial. The one who welcomed him no matter how wrecked he arrived.
Hyperion snatched the handkerchief from the knight's hand as if the man had stolen what was his.
Startled, the knight said, "Her Highness gave it to me. She said she hadn't known it was a patronage banquet..."
At those words, Hyperion's grip on the cloth tightened.
And that night, for the first time, he let the caller who came in the dark leave with his life. He had simply been in too fine a mood.
"Your Majesty! Are you even listening to me!"
The shout dragged him out of the old memory and back beneath the reproach pouring over him.
"You never said a word, so I assumed you had taken private instruction after you came to the palace. But this... I told you last time as well, did I not? What you have is far beyond the average, and so..."
"Stop badgering His Majesty! Can you not see he looks ready to dig a hole and crawl straight into it?"
The man's lecture, which had seemed as if it might go on forever, finally broke under the middle-aged woman's bark.
Hyperion looked at the two people standing before him. Gemma Ensi.Thamil Ensi. They were the physician couple who had been with him the whole time he was posted to the Northern Border.
Framed for poisoning a country lord and awaiting execution, they had been saved by Hyperion. After that, the couple followed him everywhere, tending him and his knights. Once he became Emperor they obtained the qualifications of the imperial court, and only today were they at last due to enter the palace. Of everyone Hyperion knew, theirs was the warmest marriage: five children between them. They had decided to have no more, out of worry for Gemma's health, but Gemma and all five children were remarkably well.
So he had sent a letter to the couple, who had said they would come up at their leisure.
Your counsel is needed. Come at once.
Because of it, the two of them had hurried to the capital. That was today. They had been unpacking, meaning to pay their respects tomorrow, when Hyperion came tearing in like a madman to find them, and so they were brought straight into the Main Palace.
Watching a Hyperion more thoroughly wilted than she had ever seen him, Gemma kept smacking her husband's arm.
"Do you think His Majesty made Her Majesty faint because he wanted to? Don't you remember how quietly he used to brighten whenever her name came up? How long do you imagine he has been waiting for today?"
"That may be, but..."
"You were a complete disaster your first time, too. His Majesty may be accomplished at everything, but he is allowed to be clumsy at one thing!"
At Gemma's merciless candor, the number of crestfallen men in the room became two.
"In any case, she fainted from shock and pain because she was far too tense. Fortunately there is nothing wrong with her body... Still, this may have dealt her a shock of the mind as well. I will need to examine her again once she wakes."
Only at Gemma's assurance that the body was unharmed did Hyperion finally let out a breath of relief.
Just then, a rustle came from the bed where Laniakea lay. He turned his head. Her posture had shifted a little.
Is she waking?
Hyperion rushed to the bedside. Up close, a little color had returned to Laniakea's face. To his eyes, though, she still looked deathly pale.
His gaze dropped. She lay beneath the covers, and yet he could perceive the delicate shape of her with perfect clarity. Set against him, she was far too small. And still he had been determined to push inside her...
Remembering that moment, Hyperion pressed the back of his hand to the flushed nape of his neck. To recall it now, in a moment like this, left him dizzy, and he felt like the filthiest beast in the world. Even so, the things he had seen kept rising before his eyes: Laniakea seated before him, lovelier and more fragile than anything he had imagined.
In truth, what he had looked forward to most once the coronation was over was simply that he might remain with her. It had been a grave miscalculation. They were Emperor and Empress; surely it was only natural they should be together. Contrary to every expectation, the days he never saw her face at all far outnumbered the rest.
Now and then, on his returns to the Imperial Palace, Hyperion had thought of the former Emperor and Empress, who were always together. He had thought nothing of it at the time. Looking back, he supposed the two of them must have loved one another, in their fashion. Otherwise it would not have been so easy to remain glued side by side.
In any case, the moment he saw Laniakea today, he understood that the dam he had kept shut over his own feelings was beginning, quietly, to fail.
It was only to be expected. They had been married three years. To wrench free even a little time that did not exist, he had cut the enemy down with something close to frenzy and ridden for the palace without pausing to wash. Only then could he manage so much as a single meal with his wife. And the instant that wife stood naked before him, Hyperion found himself doing precisely what he had always scorned in men mad with rut.
He had wanted to hold her longer. He had wanted to feel more. And so, even knowing she was struggling, he had buried himself deeper.
In that same moment he had felt pain of his own. His body, keyed to a sensitivity it had never known, took the heat of that narrow place and the clutch of it without any mercy at all. And yet every sensation, pain among them, had been maddeningly sweet. Sweet enough that he understood, at last, why other men went through the world out of their minds for the act.
So he had tried to go deeper still.
Then, in the instant he rolled his hips and sank deep, Laniakea's body shuddered—and went slack. She had fainted from the shock.
Guilt welled up in him. So did something like blame. If it had been that hard, she need only have said so. Why endure it until she fainted...
Then the closed line of Laniakea's brow fluttered. A moment later her eyes opened, and she blinked, slow. She looked at Hyperion and murmured.
"A dream...?"
A dream. Had he become a nightmare to her?
Even as the worry took him, the reproach he had been holding spilled out.
He had not meant to raise his voice. It rose anyway.
Laniakea's still-clouded eyes went wide. She understood that this was no dream, and that he was speaking to her.
"If you had told me beforehand, it never would have come to this...!"
Hyperion, on the verge of saying more, shut his mouth in alarm. Tears had begun to gather in the round eyes fixed upon him.
"No. I—"
While the flustered emperor floundered, at a loss for what to say, Gemma and Thamil stood behind him with pity on their faces and clicked their tongues.
Somehow, they had the distinct feeling that the road ahead of the imperial couple would be a hard one.