[Can’t Opt Out]

You cannot cut off his hand.

You cannot cut off his arm.

You cannot cut off his head.

You could maybe cut off his dick, if only because this man is a complete and total zirothix and his genetic matter should, under no circumstances, be used to create more tiny, zirothix’il ryohua.

Perhaps, if Yujao thought these things enough, he could keep himself from drawing the blade of his fan across the man’s throat. As of this moment, he’d only smacked the man’s hand away after he had gotten too familiar with him—twice, he’d smacked the ryohua twice, and really, how had this man not been fired long ago?

Granted, as being a ryohua was one of those things that one was born entitled to, not a single ryohua escaping servitude to the Inner Court and its machinations, unless they were being killed off, firing them wasn’t exactly possible. Instead, ryohua who were too inept were moved into positions where they could do little harm—things like pushing paper or being transcribers.

A few years back, there had been a ryohua so inept that she couldn’t even be a transcriber properly. It wasn’t even that she was trying to do her job badly, in order to fuck with reports and procured information—not an uncommon thing to happen and often swiftly followed by the assassination of whoever the transcript was meant to record, so they could never correct their account of things. Instead, the woman was just an idiot, claiming that she’d simply decided to design her own shorthand for transcriptions. This wasn’t exactly a bad thing—most of the ryohua had their own, personal shorthand in order to protect their thoughts and life—but the woman had no ability to read her shorthand!

“I just thought, if I wrote enough in my shorthand, I’d eventually remember what each symbol meant,” she’d said when someone finally realized that her transcripts weren’t been typed out into understandable, useable reports. It had taken a few weeks—and therefore over a hundred transcriptions—for someone to notice her sitting about, doing nothing when, surely, she must have some transcript to translate?

There were, but she couldn’t translate them. To this day, Yujao remained baffled as to what had been going through the woman’s head—after all, if she didn’t know her shorthand, she had to have been making up each symbol anew as she took her notes? How did memorizing while I’m constantly making shit up as I go work!?

It remained unknown. Now, the woman had been relegated to getting drinks for people the ryohua didn’t like—her ability to remember people’s orders was similarly atrocious. The only other option for her was death, unfortunately. The Inner Court did not relinquish their ryohua. They were reassigned to another role or snuffed out—those were the only options.

In that woman’s case, no one was going to kill her for being so stupid that seemingly no job could be done properly under her care. In this dumbasses’ case, however… no, there was a chance the idiot needed to be killed off for the good of the nation!

What was Biori Hondao even doing? Touching him. Suggesting Jin’kori eat things that would kill her. Yujao really hoped no one let him around anyone else with allergies—there were a few ryohua in the same position as Jin’kori, possessing allergies where treatment would negatively impact their irregular deviations—or anything even mildly dangerous.

It was unclear if the man was an idiot or just fucking with them, wasting their time and trying to annoy them. If it was the latter, the idiot was succeeding. If it was the former, Yujao wasn’t sure he’d feel safe, knowing the guy had access to weapons. The man seemed like the sort of person to try showing off for some love interest, only to accidentally blow an entire rondo up, which…

Yujao, unfortunately, was not in the business of killing people just for being stupid, especially when it was the level of stupid that had to be the result of something being seriously wrong with the guy. Dropped on his head. Chemical exposure. Some genetic inclination to seem normal but really only have one brain cell firing.

So, yeah. They definitely needed to figure out what this guy’s deal was. Such things had already been relegated to I'orin. For the moment, he just needed to get himself and Jin’kori away from this guy.

“Hondao’tyung,” he cooed, trying to send Jin’kori a subtle message about how she needed to stop gaping at him like that. There was a reason the rumai’se was largely confined to her studio: on top of the fact that it was her happy place, the woman had zero ability to hide her emotions. Not an ideal trait for someone living in the Inner Court, but she was both from an affluent family and was one of the best rumai’se alive—an impressive thing, considering she was only a few decades older than Yujao himself was.

The monster the woman would become… assuming she didn’t get all of them killed with her blatant looks of confusion and horror! Realistically, the woman was so stuck in her own head and studio most of the time that there was a chance she didn’t even realize that, if the faction that Yujao and his friends had created were to fall, her own family would fall with them.

Truly, Jin’kori cared little for anything but creating art and weapons. Usually, it was endearing; currently, it was liable to lead to this man’s death. Disliking killing people who might be lacking in brain cells or their ability to have coherent thoughts or not, Yujao would snuff this man’s life out without a second thought if he suddenly became more than a potential theat.

“Yeah, Yujao’kiar?” Biori Hondao replied, all salacious grins, and Yujao really couldn’t figure the guy’s deal out. Only idiots ever looked and spoke to him like that; something about assuming this man was nothing but an idiot, intent to accidentally get himself killed, didn’t seem quite accurate, however.

The alternative, of course, was that the ryohua was so confident in his abilities—or perhaps in the power of whatever faction he had aligned himself with—that he thought himself untouchable. If he did think such a thing, Yujao had to return to the idea that he was a dumbass: no one in the Inner Court was untouchable, not them, and certainly not any other faction.

There were, of course, easier ways to test someone’s competency than to test if they were pretending to have no thoughts in their head.

“You wanna see something cool?” Yujao asked, biting his lip and blinking up at the ryohua.

At the very least, the man blushed—a confirmation that either Biori Hondao was attracted to him or that he was a very good actor. Of course, Yujao knew he was pretty—his castration had effectively guaranteed that he would retain his soft features and small body. There were terrible things about his lack of testicles, of course, and he had an implant from Emilia’s childhood doctor, which monitored his hormones and gave him doses to counteract some of the side effects of his castration. It was something he could have gone to a Dionese doctor for as well, but then there would have been needles and pills. The implant was soooo much nicer, even if he had a small scar on his thigh where it was replaced every year by either Doctor Vickers—if the man happened to be visiting, which was rare, or the slightly less rare time when Yujao managed to sneak away to Baalphoria—or one of the clones.

Regardless, he was pretty, with long lashes and perfect skin. His legs went on for days, while his smaller torso also left him on the slightly shorter side. Being able to gaze up into the eyes of men? Stepping into that perfect place where, suddenly, he looked even smaller and more delicate due to the shift in perspective?

Oh yeah, Yujao was good at using what he had—and combined with his high voice and effeminate clothing? It wasn’t uncommon for people to forget that he was a boy—almost a man, although he was perfectly fine continuing to be seen as a boy. His partner certainly enjoyed seeing him as a boy, something so perverse about the reality that Hurinren increasingly looked like a man—although, his own transition into adulthood was a slow thing, thanks to his genetics—while Yujao retained a significant echo of youth within himself. When taken together with the fact that he was the one in charge in the bedroom?

It had always been hot, the reality that Hurinren needed him to be in charge. Here was this boy, one of the most powerful people in Dion, and he wanted to be forced in the bedroom—be made to do degrading things, all for Yujao’s enjoyment—and there was something so impossibly arousing about that. As their appearances shifted, Hurinren seeming both the older and more powerful of them while he himself still seemed the teenager, playing the part of mean dom?

Perverse, definitely.

Also, thank the aether for the heavy layers of the clothing style he favoured—they were doing wonders for hiding his sudden erection.

“Sure~” Biori Hondao agreed, stepping a little closer to Yujao, a little closer. They’d already been far too close and Yujao couldn’t say he was enjoying the proximity much. “What you wanna show me, sweet little thing?” he asked, eyes attempting to sweep over Yujao’s body and failing—they were far too close for the guy to see anything but his face and the flare of his clothes around him.

Seriously, what an idiot.

“Jin’kori’se?” Yujao cooed, leaning to the side and catching the rumai’se’s deep-brown eyes. In theory, the woman should be carrying around what he needed. In practice, it was Jin’kori, and honestly, if Yujao ever found her running around the Inner Court completely naked and completely unaware of her nudity, he would not be surprised.

Like he said: endearing, but also not. What Jin’kori had was a different sort of stupid, he supposed—that specific brand of a brain being good at one or two things and an epic failure at everything else. At least the girl was aware of it, never refusing help with the things in life that she had no passion or gift for. Unfortunately, Jin’kori had been meant to be in her studio all day; as a result, her babysitter had left her to it. They would have returned in a few hours with food, but Jin’kori all but never needed anything but privacy while working; hence, there was no sense in her babysitter sitting around, waiting for her to need them.

Had this been an organized visit between Jin’kori and their group, her babysitter would have been with her. The visit was nothing but sudden, and while her babysitter had been contacted, they hadn’t managed to catch up with her—with several hours free, they’d gone to visit a friend in another, smaller faction that their group was trying to align with.

In theory, that meeting was more important.

In practice, Yujao would rather have not needed to be here, accepting one of Jin’kori’s weapons from her while he babbled complete and utter shit that also happened to be entirely true to the ryohua—there was an art to lying to the truth seekers of the Inner Court, and Yujao was a master at it.

Every person in their faction had numerous fallback plans for dealing with the other factions. This wasn’t exactly uncommon—the Inner Court was a dangerous place, after all. The difference was, they trusted every member of their faction—a rarity within the Inner Court’s factions, both those past and present.

Usually, faction members cooperated in preplanned ways—they staged coups, took down rival factions, built empires. Then, someone betrayed everyone else and it became a whole new mess of politics and factions.

No one within the Inner Court was to be trusted, not even the person who shared your bed.

Their faction was a ball of trust and faith, relying on other members to carry the most personal of plans within their minds and on their person—occasionally within their body as well—all so they could appear to be some mixture of idiots and lucky fools.

“One day, a member will flip,” they had all heard whispered, both to them and not. Constantly, other factions were trying to crack their loyalty to one another by slipping doubt into their minds, by attempting to bribe them away with promises of more power as though their group didn’t already hold most of the Inner Court’s power and would one day hold it all.

They flipped, for hours and days, planting the seeds for their faction to overtake whatever fools had attempted to disrupt their power and friendship. Somehow, it didn’t matter how many dead bodies lay in their wake, nor how many souls had been forced from the Inner Court's by their machinations: to most of the older factions, they were stupid children, playing a game without knowing an important piece was betrayal.

Yet, somehow, despite so many people knowing that—with the exception of Emilia and Hurinren—they all loved and trusted one another implicitly, it was so counter to the way the Inner Court’s factions were supposed to work that everyone was constantly forgetting their loyalty belonged to one another. Part of it, he knew, was Hurinren and Emilia’s tenuous relationship, supposedly leaving this gaping wound of confusion and distrust within their faction and the Inner Court’s understanding of it. It was all lies, and it was one of their most important lies, a million strings set to snap if anyone they did not trust learned the pair loved one another unendingly.

This lingering doubt in their friendship and trust was why, when Jin’kori handed him the weapon, nothing but curiosity filled the ryohua’s eyes. Had Biori Hondao realized that the rumai’se was Yujao’s ally even in setting up a play to force the ryohua to reveal his competency, perhaps the man would have stepped away.

He didn’t; instead, he watched with empty eyes as Yujao let the woman’s weapon, a purposefully flawed thing, touch his energy.

Then, the thing exploded.