flighty_dreams | Spliced: Part 3

TITLE: Spliced - Part 3, Chapter 9B
AUTHOR:

flighty_dreams
WARNINGS: NC-17. slavefic. scifi setting. All M/m this chapter.
WORD COUNT: 7,471 (both parts of Chapter 9 combined)
SUMMARY: Part 3, Chapter 9 - None atm.
NOTES: The index to this story available here.
FEEDBACK: Always awesome and amazing!

After his shower Matt began dressing for work. Halfway through the task, a pair of pants already on but no shirt selected yet, the buzzing of the vid startled him out of his morning routine. Who would be calling him at this hour of the morning? He looked over at the vid screen, which blazed the word “unknown” in place of the caller’s name and location.

His pulse sped up. This was the third day, he remembered suddenly, and there was only one person annoying enough to call him this early in the morning. Not even Hollis would dare to unless it was urgent. Ashes, after that dream he wasn’t ready to deal with Min yet; he needed time to regroup, but typical of this day so far he wasn’t going to get any. Nervous about talking to the Andorian again, he pushed the feeling aside and accepted the call as he moved closer to the vid screen.

There was Min, sitting on a couch in another hotel room. Where did the bastard live? Matt wondered. His hair was that same brown color again, but his eyes were his natural blue. The same color combination Min had had in his dream, Matt noted with an inward shudder. But in contrast to the dream, Min was wearing clothes at the moment, denim pants and a short-sleeved, red synth-cott shirt that bared most of his arms. Unfortunately the clothes covered Min’s most interesting parts, but Matt’s shirtless state kept drawing Min’s licentious eyes down to his chest. Good, Matt thought, taking it for the compliment it was. It meant Min was still as uncontrollably attracted to Matt as Matt was to the clone.

Seating himself on his own sofa, Matt studied the clone with narrowed eyes. “Still as forthcoming as ever,” he observed sardonically, remarking on the lack of identification.

A mischievous sparkle in his eyes, Min shrugged and remained silent, which irritated Matt further. The asshole was annoying him on purpose. “Nothing to say?” Matt groused, prompting him.

“The deal was I had to call, but you didn’t specify whether I had to talk,” Min told him, grinning obnoxiously now.

A flash of irritation speared through Matt. He wished they were face to face, so he could keep those grinning lips occupied with other things—like his cock. “How mature of you,” the Kartan drawled, pushing that distracting mental image away forcefully. Straightening in his sofa, he tapped his fingers on his knee, one of his nervous habits. “I bet you purposely called when you knew I didn’t have much time to talk either.”

Min’s eyes twinkled. “Perhaps,” he half-admitted.

He’d be damned before he fell easily into his rebellious slave’s plans. “It won’t hurt if I’m late to work today,” Matt replied, one side of his mouth turning up slightly.

“I suppose not,” Min answered calmly, but his grin faltered and faded.

An awkward silence fell then, until Matt broke it. “Abducted anyone else lately, slave?”

Scowling, Min replied, “No, and don’t call me that.”

“You haven’t given me a name, so I have to use something,” Matt taunted, happy to be getting on the Andorian’s nerves.

“Use something else. I told you to call me Ril.”

“That’s part of Min’s name, it might be too confusing,” Matt told him smugly, and he noted the slave’s angry flush with satisfaction. “How about ‘clone’? You’re still one of those, right? You didn’t magically change your DNA?”

The sarcasm irritated Min, sharpening his tone in return. “I know you’ll say ‘clone’ just as condescendingly as you say ‘slave.’ ”

“I’ll call you whatever I want, Andorian. Your ass belongs to me.”

“I’m not a possession! No one owns me, not even you,” Min grated out furiously, rising from his seat with smooth, dangerous grace. “You’ll never get it,” he said with frustration. “Fuck this,” he cursed, reaching for the remote.

“Don’t you fucking dare cut this call off,” Matt threatened, livid at the clone. “Stop running away, you ashen fucking coward.”

Min’s brows lowered as he glared back at Matt. Enunciating slowly and carefully he said, “I’m not a coward. But all we do is argue; it’s not like we’re accomplishing anything.”

“And what exactly did you expect to accomplish?” Matt asked with only slightly more curiosity than anger.

“Talk like civilized people? It was just a hope though, not an expectation. I knew this would happen. That’s why I wanted to keep this short. Say hi, yes I’m alive, I’m fine, see ya.”

“Just check in?”

“Yes. I didn’t expect any more from you.”

Matt’s eyes narrowed. “You fucking shot me! Twice! What could you possibly expect after the way you treated me? Attacking me, abducting me, and then holding me hostage until I agreed to the contract you forced on me?” Muldane’s voice grew more heated as he spoke, his anger bubbling out.

“You had the option to say no,” Min refuted, but even he didn’t sound like he believed that.

Matt laughed harshly, and Min’s face tightened, but he said nothing. “Right,” the Kartan told him sarcastically. “I can’t believe you have the nerve to expect anything from me, Andorian.”

Min shrugged helplessly, and seemed to chose his words carefully. “You’ll always look at me and see only a slave and a clone, so you’ll never treat me with respect. With that condition hanging over them, our conversations will always turn into arguments.” Matt said nothing, allowing him to continue. “So of course they’ll always be unpleasant. That’s why I’d rather keep it short, and then we don’t have a chance to really argue.”

His anger, simmering just under the surface, cooled down a bit at those words, and Matt frowned thoughtfully. He had a point to prove, and he came up with an idea for how to do it. “Going by that logic though, if we keep things to a minimum, then we’ll never make any progress either.”

“Progress?” Reluctantly Min sat back down.

Matt smiled knowingly, guiding the conversation where he wanted it to go. “I thought your goal was to convince me you were more? Not just a slave?”

The Andorian’s expression blanked, marking the first time Matt had seen that mask since Min’s departure months earlier. Perhaps he was confused, but Matt had no intention of clearing it up for him. “Yes, I want you to see that I’m a person, not property. I’m not a thing or a child, and you treating me like either is offensive. I’m a man,” he brazenly told Matt.

Inwardly Matt agreed that the clone was neither a thing nor a child, but it didn’t deter his determination to claim Min as his. “So you want me to not think of you as a slave, and to respect you.” Matt kept his tone calm, which seemed to worry Min. Good.

The Andorian fidgeted restlessly and said, “Yes.”

“That’s a little hard when I don’t know you at all, and you won’t even tell me anything about yourself,” Matt stated, with faint triumph. “Trust works both ways. And all this is not even counting our history so far, which doesn’t inspire trust.”

Now the clone saw Matt’s ploy to learn more. He didn’t deny that Matt had a point though. “Fine, I understand that. But you don’t need to know or trust someone to have a civil conversation with him. I’ll settle for that at the moment.”

Matt thought it over, but he couldn’t come up with any objections. There were plenty of other things he’d rather do to or with Min, but none of them were possible through a vid call. That left talking, and maybe he could find out something useful. So he finally said, “All right, let’s talk then.” He paused a moment before continuing, “Since you seemed to have so much fun altering the records on your chip, I can’t trust anything on it. Tell me, how many years have you been active?”

Min gave him a look as disgusted as a Kartan socialite at a pig farm. “Active? None.”

“What?”

“I’ve been alive for a quite a long time, not active. I’m not a fucking machine, I’m a person,” Min retorted, bristling.

Matt rolled his eyes. Before Festun, he’d rarely heard Min curse other than during sex. Hearing it in regular conversation was still novel enough to be amusing rather than irritating. “Fine, alive. Active is the common word for it.”

“Yeah, and it’s offensive,” was Min’s brusque response.

“Offensive?” Matt asked in astonishment. How could a clone not be accustomed to the use of the word ‘active’?

“If I asked you how long you’d been active instead of alive, how would you feel?”

Indignation rose up within Matt instinctively, and instantly he realized Min’s point. It did feel offensive, but for different reasons. He wasn’t a clone, and didn’t like being treated like one. “Fine,” he said, rephrasing his question with exasperation, “how old are you?”

Min leaned back further against the sofa, apparently considering this a difficult question. He was silent so long that Matt prompted snidely, “What, do you need to count out the years on your fingers?”

The clone scowled at him fiercely. “No, I’m debating whether to be honest.”

It was Matt’s turn to glare at him. “You’re going to lie about your age?”

“Fine,” Min drawled, “I’ll tell you the truth.” He paused a moment for effect and then revealed, “I’m almost as old as you are.”

“What?” Matt barked disbelievingly. The notion was ridiculous.

“You’re thirty-one, right?”

“Yes,” the Kartan admitted slowly, staring quizzically at the clone.

“I’m in my late 20s,” Min told him.

“That’s impossible,” Matt argued, disbelief and fear warring within him. “Andorians often don’t even make it to twenty-five. Even if you were as old as you say, your condition would definitely be showing by now.”

“Ah, HCD,” Min murmured, referring to the Hastened Cellular Deterioration that afflicted all clones eventually. His next words were surprising. “No, I won’t ever get it.”

“How?” asked Matt suspiciously, his brows drawing down. If it were true it would be wonderful news, but he wasn’t that naïve. He wouldn’t dare believe it.

The Andorian leaned forward, closer to the screen, and his gaze was grim as he explained it with the authority of a tenured college professor. “HCD is caused by the use of growth inducing treatments on clones. Labs don’t want to pay the bills for let’s say twenty years of raising a clone from infancy to adulthood. So while clones are still fetuses in artificial wombs, they begin using the growth inducers to speed up their physical maturity. Employing growth inducers saves them thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of credits per clone, and they’re all about reducing costs of course.” His lip curled. “Cloning is big business.”

Replaying Min’s words, Matt concluded hesitantly, “So you’re saying you never received those treatments?”

The Andorian shook his head. “Nope. For the basics that companies normally want to teach clones, they can use the inducers and then just train them for a year or so. But in my case,” Min paused here, “there were so many other things they wanted to teach, that method wouldn’t work. By the time they taught us everything we needed to know, a significant portion of our short lifespans would’ve been used up by the training. Not using the growth inducers cost them more credits and more time, but they didn’t lose any time as far as the years we could be useful to them. And with normal lifespans to work with now, they could use us for a lot longer as well.”

Frowning Matt processed what the clone was telling him. “You had a childhood?” he asked, shocked.

Min let out a quick, bitter laugh. “Yes. A horrid one, but I did.” He tucked his hands in tight to his chest, his eyes far away. “We were lab rats to them. On top of the training, there were… experiments.”

“Experiments?” Matt asked, intensely curious to learn all he could about the Andorian. Recent events had certainly proved he knew far too little.

Min’s gaze sharpened, focusing back on Matt and he shook his head. “Bad ones. Things that should never be done to kids.”

The Kartan understood the desire to leave the past in the past, but he couldn’t help himself. He wanted to know more. “Just one example.” Seeing his continuing reluctance, Matt phrased his next words carefully, hoping to persuade the clone. “I just want to understand what it was like.”

The Andorian looked away for a moment, his expression unhappy. But then he shifted his eyes back onto Matt and nodded slightly. “Fine,” he breathed out, and lifted his hands up. The fingers of one hand rubbing at the fingers of the other, he looked down at them and said, “He—that is the man who started the project, who was in charge—he used to break my fingers. He wanted to test how rapidly I healed, and if the timing of it varied.” The arctic eyes were haunted and angry. “He did it to me several times over a couple of years, I don’t remember how many. I was four when he started doing it. That was just one of his many ‘experiments’. Asshole.”

Matt felt sickened as he pictured four year old Min, his blue eyes big and tearful, crying as the man tortured him. He knew slaves were abused all the time; he hadn’t always been the ideal owner himself, especially back on Karta—he could admit that to himself at least, though not to Min. But to so coldly do that, and to a four year old little boy… The fact that it was Min and that he’d been a small child made it all the worse. Fury rose within him, the urge to destroy the man who had hurt Min, his Min. But it had all happened a long time ago, and the man in question was far away or dead. There was nothing Matt could do about it.

Suddenly he was doubly glad Min had escaped—who knows what else could’ve happened to him the longer he stayed there? The realization that there would’ve been no legal way to stop the man from doing that and countless other things to Min, because he owned him… for the first time he really pondered it, slavery’s full potential for abuse. It wasn’t something he hadn’t known—he’d seen some abusive slave owners throughout his life—but he hadn’t really faced it on a personal level, as something that could happen to someone he cared about.

Ashes, he really did care about Min, didn’t he? First all the worrying about where he was for months, and now this, this overwhelming urge to protect him from harm. This new awareness of his feelings for Min unsettled him; if you cared about someone, you made yourself vulnerable to them, and all of Min’s deceptions didn’t make him trustworthy. On top of that, this other strange Min certainly didn’t want or need his protection. So who was he really trying to protect then? The mostly obedient slave who’d served him for six months, who he wasn’t even sure was real anymore? He had only this Min’s word that he really did exist, that it hadn’t been just a trick. This was all far too confusing; he’d have to wait until Min’s return to get his answers.

But what had happened to the clone was terrible. Min was right, he’d definitely had a horrible childhood, if the finger breaking was just one example of the abuses he’d endured.

His eyes met Min’s, who was watching him, probably gauging his reaction. “I’m sorry, Min,” he told the clone, knowing how insufficient those words were. They didn’t take away what had happened, but he meant them sincerely.

Min shrugged, as if it all meant nothing now, but Matt saw right through it. “It was over twenty years ago. The winds pass, as the Monleans say.”

“Some things you never get over,” Matt countered, the weight of experience in his voice.

Min smiled wryly. “True enough.” He paused hesitantly and then added deliberately, “I wasn’t the only one he abused. My siblings got their own share of his attention too.”

“Siblings?” Matt asked, his interest aroused by that mention.

“The others like me. We aren’t genetic siblings, but we were all born in that lab, raised there, and trained there. We grew up together.”

“Oh,” Matt said inadequately. What makes Min so different from us? Hollis had asked him, and Matt could feel the reasons he’d given crumbling. His Andorian not only had a childhood, but also family. It left Matt feeling precarious, on the edge of something he couldn’t name. What was there left to set them so apart now? Had thinking Min so different from himself ever seemed as foolish as it did now? And yet, the primitive, possessive part of him still blazed with the desire to claim Min as his.

Not wanting to dwell on his confusing feelings, he focused back at Min, who was staring at him, looking perplexed. “What?”

“You have this weird look on your face. Surprised that I have family?”

“Yes.” Matt saw no point in denying it.

Frowning, Min replied, “Every clone has siblings. They don’t train clones alone; they always train them as a group. It’s not the prolonged training that I had since they’re born fully grown, but they do spend a lot of time together for at least a year, and their minds develop together.” Min’s voice hardened, his loathing for the system obvious. “There’s a bond there, a bond that’s abruptly broken when they’re sold off separately, never to see each other again.”

Matt had never considered that, and from his tone, Min well knew it. Matt flushed, embarrassed to be caught out. “That must be very traumatic,” he ventured, suddenly realizing how deeply horrifying it was. Leaving everything and everyone you knew behind, to be sold to some unknown master; how terrifying to be so powerless, unable to control anything that happened to you. For a control freak like himself, slavery was about the worst thing he could imagine. He knew all about the anguish of being powerless, someone else directing your life for you.

Needing not to think about this anymore, he turned back to Min and asked about something else that was bothering him. “What happened to your siblings when you escaped?”

Min grew still, his eyes far away, looking back at the past. “I brought most of them out with me. But there were a few I couldn’t reach. I had to leave them behind.”

That’s right, Matt thought to himself, remembering Min back on Festun talking about his past and mentioning that he’d left people behind. “And you feel guilty about that,” Matt said to him now.

“Of course. How could I not?” Min told him despondently, his voice laden with regret.

“I feel the same way about my sister. I couldn’t get her away from Karta,” Matt said, suddenly feeling the compulsion to say it. He needed to share it with someone who understood the ever-lingering remorse of leaving someone you loved behind to a horrible fate. “I failed her.”

Min gazed back at him sadly, understanding and sympathy in his eyes. For a long moment, there was a silent exchange between them, before Min asked gently, “Would you like to tell me about it?”

Matt’s first impulse was to do so, but he paused long enough to think about it. What was he doing? He’d gone from cursing Min for his rebelliousness to being ready to confide in him. It was too much too fast.

He studied the clone, who was examining him carefully in return. Acknowledging a shared guilt was one thing, discussing it in detail was quite another. The slave was too deceptive; Matt wouldn’t trust him with such things. Doubts overwhelming suddenly, he wondered if the story about Min’s fingers was really true. After a moment he decided yes, that much he was certain of. Min’s eyes had been truly haunted.

“No,” Matt denied softly, deciding it was better to be careful, as always.

Min appeared disappointed for a moment, but he took it in stride. A calm silence descended between them before Min’s next words disturbed it. “I do have something else to ask you about.”

“Oh?” Matt’s brows rose in interest. Clearly the clone had decided they needed a new topic, and Matt was happy to comply.

“How did you get your business started?”

Matt was startled, but he acknowledged that although it wasn’t something a slave would normally ask, it wasn’t all that surprising coming from this new Min, especially since Matt knew he’d received a full education. Matt didn’t answer right away though, wondering about his motives for such a question. “Why the sudden interest?”

Min smiled, but there was an edge to his tone when he replied, “It isn’t sudden. I always wondered, but it wasn’t appropriate for me to ask before.”

“And it is now?” Disapproval colored Matt’s tone. He didn’t like Min asking him personal questions.

“Before I was pretending to be no different than any other Andorian. We both know better now though, don’t we?”

Matt laughed, catching Min by surprise. “If you were trying to be like any regular Andorian, you didn’t succeed, even back then. I knew you were different, and I thought you were too smart for your own good.”

“Too smart for a slave you mean?” Min frowned unhappily.

“Yes,” Matt answered, and Min looked even more frustrated. “You want a slave to be useful, but you don’t want him to be sly. Normally people don’t have to worry about Andorians being that way, but you were different. You required a firm hand.” The familiar words, things he’d thought many times before, slipped out of him easily, but he lacked conviction now. He was too off balance and filled with doubts from what he’d learned about Min.

Min’s glower deepened, obviously disagreeing. “Despite your words, you preferred me that way though. The dumb slaves bore you after a while,” Min pointed out.

Matt frowned in return. “Maybe,” he hedged, unwilling to verify it to Min, even though he’d learned during their separation that it was completely true. Even with all the shocking things he’d learned about Min on Festun and today, he’d still take him over any other slave. The new information made him more alluring, not less, because he was even more of a challenge to tame now.

Min shook his head. “Can’t hide that truth from me.” Standing up, he added, “I’ll be right back.” He headed over to the fridge and came back with a bottle of Pyrunian orange soda, taking a long drink of it as he sat down.

Matt grimaced at the sight of his soda. “Guess it’s not so early where you’re at.” Matt could never drink soda in the morning.

“No,” Min grinned, and Matt noted pensively that when the clone was living with him, Min hadn’t grinned half so often as this other Min seemed to. The observation saddened a part of him deep inside. “And you never answered my question,” Min reminded Matt, stirring him from his morose thoughts.

Matt hesitated for a minute, mulling over the form of his response. Finally he stated, “Honestly, it’s nothing exciting. On Karta the age of majority is twenty, so once I was twenty I cleaned out the personal account that had been held in trust for me and took it with me when I left. I held onto that money carefully and once I’d worked for a few years and learned more about the shipping industry, I invested the remaining money in my own shipping company.”

Min quirked up an eyebrow quizzically, and a memory of him doing that in bed with him flashed through Matt’s mind briefly. “I thought you had a falling out with your dad. He still let you take the money?”

The mention of his father wiped away any pleasant thoughts the memory of Min conjured. “It wasn’t his. My grandfather set it up for me. He was good friends with my dad’s father, but unfortunately learned too late that my dad wasn’t such a good man. My mother had already married him by then, and it was too late to back out.”

“Well, if the marriage was unhappy, couldn’t she get a divorce?” Min asked reasonably.

Matt laughed harshly. “You don’t know much about Kartan culture. It’s incredibly difficult for a woman to get a divorce. No, they were stuck, so my grandfather gave me the money secretly in case I needed it one day. So I could be free of my father.”

“It’s only hard for a woman? A man can get a divorce easily?” Min asked curiously, his interest obvious.

“Well, he has to have justification for it, mostly to explain to his father-in-law why he’s revoking the marriage. Marriages are big business on Karta, creating business alliances and partnerships,” Matt explained, holding back the grimace the discussion of Kartan society naturally brought out of him.

Min frowned, thinking over his explanation. “So parents sell their children into marriages? Like commodities?”

“Yes, daughters especially but sons are often pressured into it.” Matt’s eyes were far away, remembering.

Realization hit Min, and Matt saw his eyes widen. “Is that why you left? Your dad was forcing you to marry?”

The clone’s intuition surprised the Kartan. Matt gritted his teeth, still hating the ruthless bastard that was his father. “Yes. He wanted me to help him with a business merger, just like he’d made my sister do. It was the end for me, I couldn’t stay any longer.”

“Wow, I never knew why you left.” Frowning, Min asked, “I take it on Karta parents don’t factor in their child’s sexual preferences?””

“Definitely not. They don’t care what you do with slaves in your free time, but you have to marry.” His father hadn’t cared that he had no interest in women, and had insisted that if he had to fuck a male, it had to be a slave. His affair with Taurent, the son of another wealthy Kartan dynasty, would’ve created a huge scandal if it had ever gotten out.

Min spoke again, his voice heated and anger flaring in his eyes. It made the bastard look even more attractive. “That’s ridiculous, completely ignoring their children’s opinions and treating them like slaves to be sold off to the highest bidder.”

Matt’s eyes flashed angrily at the comparison, and at his continuing inability to resist the clone. “They aren’t treated as slaves. These are rich, wealthy families. I had anything I wanted growing up.”

“But were you happy?” Min asked knowingly, and Matt shifted uncomfortably, the bullet hitting its target. Seeing Matt scowl at his words but say nothing to refute them, he added, “I’ve often seen people start treating their slaves better, keeping them healthier by giving them more food, etc. You know what slaves suspect when their owners suddenly start being nicer? That they’re about to be sold.”

Moving restlessly, he watched Matt’s eyes widen and then continued, “You make the package as attractive as possible for the sale. For the Kartans you’re talking about, my guess is that would mean the best education, particularly in learning how to be polite, knowing the dictates of society, and behaving properly.”

Matt flushed, not liking how accurate a picture Min painted of Kartan society, especially while comparing it to slavery. “How do you know all this?”

Min shrugged innocently, annoyingly avoiding an answer. “So you have these children who are born into a rich family, and from birth they’re showered with toys and material things. And the parents believe they have the right to dictate their lives, which to some extent they do of course, but even beyond normal parenting. They decide what school you attend, who you spend time with, and eventually who you marry. So if you aren’t given the opportunity to decide major life choices like marriage, isn’t that comparable to slavery? It’s certainly not freedom.”

Frowning, Matt contended, “It’s not slavery either though. You can’t compare the two like that.” Min shrugged, not agreeing, but didn’t interrupt him. “No one is 100% free. Everyone has to obey laws, and there are lines you can’t cross.”

“Of course. But when other people are making huge life decisions for you, even when you’re old enough to make them yourself? And they aren’t choices that are illegal or put others at risk? That’s a different type of restriction, an infringement on your rights. It’s unfair, and you must have thought so too, or else you wouldn’t have left.”

With a final glower, Matt leaned back, dismissing the discussion. “Fine, it’s not slavery, but yes it’s unfair. So I left.”

“I never directly said it was slavery, just that it had some comparison to it.” Min leaned back against his sofa too.

“Do you always have to have the last word?” Matt asked irritably, frustrated by how much he didn’t know about his own slave.

Laughter bubbled up out of Min. Smiling jovially, he replied, “Yes. You catch on quick. Other people complain about it too.”

“That I can believe,” Matt grumbled, rubbing at his eyes.

Still grinning, Min’s eyes unfocused, his thoughts obviously on whoever else had grumbled about that particular character flaw. After a minute or so he focused back on Matt, who had been intensely studying him the whole time. Min’s own eyes swept over Matt’s chest again, and Matt saw the familiar spark of lust form in those arctic eyes. A smile playing at the clone’s lips, he raised his arms slowly up above his head and stretched, apparently deciding that if Matt was going to stare, he’d give him a bit of a show.

The Kartan’s eyes followed the movement, not bothering to deny himself the pleasure of looking at what belonged to him. The muscles in those lean arms flexed and Matt remembered what it felt like to run his hands along them. His eyes moved from those arms to Min’s shoulders, and then to his chest and down to Min’s stomach, where a strip of skin was showing beneath the raised hem of the red shirt. Curtailing the frustration that arose at being unable to touch the clone, Matt smirked a bit and drawled, “Still trying to use your looks even as you deny that you’re Andorian?”

With another grin Min told him, “I never denied being half-Andorian, I just denied the slave part. I’d have to break every mirror I came across to deny the Andorian genes.”

“Indeed,” Matt agreed, murmuring. With either personality, he still found the clone irresistible.

He didn’t say more, and Min began to fidget. It was strange to see, since he knew from experience that Min was capable of sitting still for long periods of time. Maybe this version of him couldn’t?

Checking the time, Min met his eyes and said, “Well, I should get going. I’ll call you again next week, as agreed.”

That was fine with Matt, and they signed off a few seconds later. Better to end the conversation now when there was an opening, and before it degenerated again, as it had briefly early on. And of course, he did have to get to work.

Matt hadn’t been sure what to expect from these calls with Min. What did he have to talk about with a slave? But they had talked, quite a bit in fact. Overall it had gone better than he expected, and he liked having the assurance that the slave was still coming back to him. Of course logically he knew the clone wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble on Festun if he wasn’t serious about returning, but the bolstered promise of it still warmed him.

His day was looking up.

Chapter 10

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

caz-in-a-teacup.livejournal.com

Oooh, that was more of a conversation than I expected -- and more of a concession from Matt. A slight breakthrough in Matt's way of thinking, I would say, paving the way for many more! Wonderful development of the story.

From:

The queen of wishful thinking

Spliced: Part 3 - Chapter 9B

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