Cohost writing prompt: @spy-thief-assassin-who — Rebel who accidentally just caught the Empress in the midst of a very intimate moment
The dockside bar is barely more than a counter recessed into a corridor wall, three wobbly stools, and a set of vending machines for ethanol-and-mixer, groundnuts, and prophylactics. The entire length of the counter is sticky, it’s located immediately by the entrance to a public toileting cubicle, and the whole area smells faintly of piss.
Lounging around it are half a dozen locals in a uniform of sorts; handwraps and veils in matching gang colours, belts and tall boots prickling with chrome studs. Timni knows one or two of them, a little, in the way that one can’t be a smalltime trader and not know various ports’ petty criminal powers. She’s sunk two small and overpriced waxed-paper cups of palate-scouring liquid and exchanged harmless news before footsteps click up from the direction of the ship.
She’d all but begged the Empress to remain aboard. She knows, abundantly, that the Empress discounts her words as irrelevant noise to the person and will of imperial magnificence.
The Empress’ refusal to keep away while Timni is conducting her necessarily low business is a massing curse. Her blank-expressioned glare and privileged comportment are easily read as bountiful contempt for everything around her; even with their sympathy for Timni’s well-known foible for women of cruelty and disregard, Timni is fast shedding friends who’ll deal with her until she sheds “her latest”, or at least persuades her to stop interfering in business deals.
Timni, of course, can do neither, and cannot explain either that fact or its cause.
Her Effulgence closes a bruising grip around Timni’s wrist as she passes with stopping, wrenching her from the stool and dragging her in an unsteady stumble behind. The sneering ruler snatches open the door alongside the bar, marked with iconography for any-gender toileting, and wrenches Timni, whimpering, inside, to an outside chorus of exclamations and coarse laughter.
“Paramount Highness!” she whispers, shaking, as the Empress turns fathom-deep, frigid eyes on her.
“Those are seditious criminals wearing the colours of Imperial abolition,” the Empress seethes.
“Effulgence!” Timni mouths, not even daring to voice or aspirate it at all. “You know I encounter many criminals—”
“Imperial abolitionists.” The Empress takes hold of Timni’s jaw with her other hand, squeezing painfully.
“Effulgence, the door is cheaply thin.” Timni’s eyes dart, panicked. “They will hear and they will suspect you — we need to maintain cover—”
The Empress cocks her head, looking past Timni at the door. And even Timni can hear the surreptitious step outside, an eavesdropping ear brought close.
Timni drops to her knees, head wrenched up by the grip on her face, gives her Empress a look of abject pleading terror, and does her best to duck beneath the Empress’ skirt, eyes clamped desperately shut. The Empress seems to grasp the subterfuge, almost more horribly than not; leans fluidly back against cramped cubicle’s wall and wraps a cool, powerful leg around Timni’s shoulders.
When the dockside mobster pulls the door open, they gaze for a second at Timni — kneeling, shaking, caged in thighs and curtained with skirt; her hands instinctively balled into tight fists at the small of her back, where the risk of accidentally setting a finger on the Empress’ body is small.
“Ah, Timni,” they say with cheerful contempt. “You finally landed one that wants you as whipped as you do!” and Timni lets out a strangled, pathetic sob.
“I am busy,” the Empress says coldly, conspicuously shifting her grip around Timni’s skull, repositioning her as if this is what it deliberately resembles.
“Pardon our rough manners,” and Timni knows, despite the smile-sharp tone, this is another place she had best now avoid, at least unless she can one day arrive without the Empress, and they kick the door shut again on the two of them.
“Insolent,” the Empress says, not loud but viciously, but fortunately that passes well enough for a thing that some girl of Timni’s might say to her, under the circumstances.
“Effulgence,” Timni whispers desperately, over and over, until enough minutes have passed for the sake of verisimilitude and the Empress shoves her away, then hauls her to her feet by the throat, shoves her face into the tiny sink and roughly washes her face to look as though, prior, it needed some washing; before dragging her by the wrist again, cold and indifferent-faced, Timni damp and flushed and miserably abject, back through the jeering gaggle to the ship.
“Have a care with whom you consort,” the Empress hisses, back aboard, still painfully gripping her arm, and Timni breaks into outright crying.
“C-consort? They simply happen to be the ones who run the local docks! And happen to hate the government! Which technically isn’t even you at this moment! I no more c-c-consorted than with you—” and she wrenches herself free and runs to fling herself face down on her bunk. Hiding her head under her arms, she refuses to move, even after she stops sobbing, until she is entirely certain that that Empress has stopped standing by her and glaring at her back and gone away.
