“You don’t seem very happy,” Konan noticed. “Is the decor not to your liking?”
She had to ask. If she didn’t ask now, she’d be wondering forever. “What happened here? Why was everybody so scared to see you?”
“Propaganda, mostly,” Konan said. “The schemers and the plotters made sure that the common people were unable to tell who ruled in their best interests. But there were… incidents.”
“Incidents?”
“After my father died, I ordered a hundred days of executions.” He looked down at her with a lidded gaze. “You have no idea how fortunate you have been with me, human, how gentle and kind I have been to you and with you.”
“A hundred days of executions. That’s…. horrifying.”
“Nobody enjoyed it. Least of all me. But it weeded out the corrupt. Those who had plotted against the crown paid the price. That is part of the reason I did not put it on. I didn’t want to be fair or wise. My father had been those things, and in the end, he was murdered for them. I wanted to be a monster stalking the collective consciousness of my people. And I was. Until Herk took the crown and the throne and I was forced to choose between killing him and leaving Masih in exile. I chose to save my brother. I chose to leave.”
That was probably true. But it wasn’t all the truth. She had worked that much out for herself. Konan had been telling her edited versions of everything from the very beginning.
“What are you going to do now? More killing?”
“I don’t need to kill, now that I understand the crown. The people fear me. Violence is no longer necessary now I have complete control.”
The first part of the sentence had sounded almost as though he had decided to be a better king, but the last part absolutely destroyed that illusion.
“Okay. Well. Okay. I feel…”
“What do you feel, human?”
“I feel I should probably tell you that you’re starting to look like the bad guy.”
She knew he wasn’t going to want to hear that. Bad guys always thought that they were good guys. They always got super offended when you pointed out their evil and whatnot. She’d seen that happen enough times back on Earth to be surprised by his annoyance now.
“What does that mean?”
“It means every story has a good guy and a bad guy, and I don’t think you’re the good guy.”
“Elizabeth, I am the good guy, I am the bad guy. I am the guy. There’s no other guy as far as you and anyone else is concerned.”
“That’s a thing a bad guy would say.”
He smirked. “Don’t be so stuck in dichotomies, human. Things are not all good, or all bad.”
“Except mass executions. They’re always bad.”
Konan took offense. She’d known he would eventually.
“Your values. Your beliefs. Your judgements. Your inability to understand that you are not in a story. Events are unfolding around you in complete chaos and all you can do is grasp at the ones you perceive and try to weave them into some form of sense, because that is the only way you can survive without spending every second of every day screaming into oblivion. I killed those who needed to die. I do not regret it, nor will I apologize for it, nor will I explain it to a simple little wretch with limited senses and even more limited intelligence.”
She narrowed her eyes and bit back a comment which would have earned her a beating. Konan was out of control. He had always been arrogant, possessive, and domineering, but he had never been this cruel. She knew it was the crown doing this to him, even though the crown hadn’t actually been on his head when he was running about the place killing everybody in what sounded like a fit of paranoia.
“You are my fuckmeat,” he told her. “You are a hole into which I insert myself. Nothing more.”
“Yeah, well, you’re a big dumb meat suit being worn by a sentient hat.”
So much for biting back the comment. There was no way she was going to allow Konan to speak to her that way. He might be king, but nobody treated her like a piece of meat.
What was happening to him? He opened his mouth, but it was not his words which came out. They were the words of the crown. They felt wrong. They felt contrary to his nature and to his true thoughts, and yet they poured from his lips.
Her words had caused him to feel shame and regret for his previous actions. He knew he had not been the good guy, as she so simply put it. He'd told himself that he’d fled the planet because Herk took the crown. In truth, he’d fled himself, and the atrocities which had unfolded in his name.
The crown told him that they were all necessary and right, but he knew in his core that the human was right. She was a soft, beautiful little piece of innocence in a dark universe — and he was on the verge of hurting her in a way he could never forgive himself for.