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Rat Rebellion

Chapter 14

By Draconicon

It was the Night of Rape, though only those that conducted it and those that suffered it knew the name. Anastus was one of them, and despite his vengeance, there was a part of him that continued to hate himself for it. The rat seized hold of that feeling, nursing his guilt and his shame. If he didn't, if he allowed himself to feel too good about what he did, he knew that what came after would be as bad as the fox's reign. Perhaps worse, in some respects. The foxes had been incidental monsters, nursing the horrors of their bigoted reign. The rats would be real monsters.

The night passed in sweat, screams, and seed, and by morning, Jovian and his government were all claimed by the rats. Anastus sat in the study of the mansion, the naked rat looking out the window as he considered the future. Aeliana sat with him, on the opposite side of the desk holding the governor's various decrees. The signed statement of the King lay between them, declaring an end to certain activities of the Kingdom and the start of others. Anastus sighed, rubbing his head.

"It has to be done," he said. "It has to be done."

"It does," the vixen agreed. "When will it start?"

"Tomorrow."

"The courts?"

"I've picked the foxes for it. You can pick the rats."

She nodded, but didn't stand up. He expected her to say something, but instead, she sat in silence.

In a way, it made sense. They were both looking at the end of an era. She was staring down the end of vulpine dominance in the land and the rise of a slave race looking to take their place among their former masters. He was looking at the beginning of consequences for himself and everyone else that had taken part in the uprising. At the very least, the 'officers', the ones that had deliberately chosen to break others.

Like him.

Like Lidochka, if she could be found.

Like so many of us...

He pressed his fingers to his face, his claws curling but not quite scratching through the fur. He felt the points and almost gave in to the temptation to slice at his face, to cut at his cheeks and flesh. Everything that he'd done had been for the sake of the rats, he'd told himself, but he knew that wasn't the case for all of them. Not by a long shot.

Monsters survive. They do not build. They do not better themselves. They do not fix things. The monsters that kept us alive were necessary, but they can't go forward into the next era.

Shaking his head, he forced his hand down, looking up at his...he didn't know what to call Aeliana. She wasn't a bodyguard, wasn't someone at all loyal to him aside from what his cursed seed had forced from her. The most that could be said was that she harbored some sympathy for him and his people, but even that was pushing it. But...she had stood with him, pulled him back.

For that, he thanked her.

"Cassia?" he asked.

"What about her?"

"She wasn't on the list."

"You wouldn't have wanted her on a jury."

"It would have given it some respectability. Someone that hates us judging us makes mercy look real."

"She wouldn't have judged anyone fairly. Death would have been her only demand."

The rat sighed. He understood the subtext. There would be no more Cassia; her demands had been granted in a different way.

Shaking his head, he looked down at the decree again. The official declaration of rat uplift would be difficult for most of the Kingdom to accept. He imagined that most of the nobles would fight it, but that was why they had worded it differently. It wasn't immediate; the rats were set free, but they were still low-class. The nobles still had power, and true equality was still a long way off.

However, the foxes would be responsible for the training, educating, and uplifting of the rats. They would be forced to pay reparations, to run the schools that educated the rats and made them part of society. There would be no more free labor; rats would have to be paid for their work. There would be no more house-slaves. There would be servants, those that chose to work for the foxes.

It was a system that had every reason to succeed, and every reason to fail. The nobles were to be compensated, with every coin spent on the uplift matched by the crown's funds, with a percentage of the outflow sent back as compensation to the nobles that invested most into the uplift of the rats. It was meant as a way to encourage them to spend more, do more, offer more...

But if their hate was such that they could not get over their own disdain of the rats, if they were all like Cassia, then the plan would fail.

Anastus smiled. It was a rueful smile, but a smile nonetheless as he pushed the paper across the table.

"The problem of free will..."

"Are you changing the plan?" Aeliana asked.

"...No."

He wasn't even tempted, surprisingly enough. He half-expected to be, to have fear rise up and make him take back his offers of peace and a new world, but he honestly didn't want to. On the contrary, he looked forward to giving up control and allowing the world to do what it willed.

"I've made my point. I became a monster, I struck back. Now...now, it's up to the rest of the world to decide if they heard what my actions said. If they didn't...if the monsters didn't scare them enough to make them want to be better..."

The vixen looked at the paper. Unlike some of the others, she didn't have the dead-eyed, consumed stare of the slave. She looked considering, then almost sad.

She knew the possibilities, he supposed. Ever since she'd seen the raw, unfiltered hate that Cassia carried, something had changed for her. Oh, it had started with his torture and the way that the King had been completely, utterly consumed with the need to destroy the rat before him, but it was Cassia's deeper speciesism that had shattered the vixen's denial. After seeing that, there was no hiding just how bad the situation was, or how lost so many rats actually were in the Kingdom.

"We have to hope for the best," Aeliana said. "There have to be some of us that'll understand."

"That's what I hope. That's what I desperately hope."

"...I'll have it sent. The riders are ready."

He nodded, and the vixen left him alone.

As he stared out the window at the city below, he imagined what would happen over the next few weeks. For that matter, over the next few months, or years. It hardly seemed worth thinking about sometimes, considering that the courts could judge him as guilty as some of the others out there. They could sentence him to death, and if the nobility of the land decided against Jovian's 'reforms', they could easily revolt and put down the puppet King and all the rats that lived under the foxes. Thinking of the future seemed more pointless than ever with that in mind.

But in a way, that was what made it all the more important to do it. Being a slave meant living from moment to moment, never daring to think too far ahead because it hurt too much to remember that this would be your life from that moment to the day you died. To think of the future meant admitting that you were never likely to get anything more. At least the present, no matter how horrifying, was only the present. It was only that one second, not an endless stream of more.

"That's how we got here, though. Only thinking of the present, never thinking of the future."

He stood up, shaking his head as he walked to the window. Resting his claws against the glass, he imagined the city brought to life again. He imagined rats walking freely, with clothes for once, and what they would do if they were allowed to talk to foxes, employ them as well as being employed by them. What would it be like?

It almost felt wrong to imagine it. They had been under them for so long. Hate, fear, and more mixed together in a sickening blend that left him curling his fingers and scratching the glass, and he turned away.

"It has to happen," he muttered. "We can't..."

There was no way to split the Kingdom. He'd considered it, imagined it as a possibility, but even though the rats constituted the greater numbers of the Kingdom, they couldn't just establish their own land. Too many of them were too dumb for that, deliberately kept ill-educated so that they had to rely on their vulpine masters to know how to farm, how to read, how to do anything beyond the brute labor that they did by nature. The foxes would lose their labor force; the rats would lose just as much.

It would end both of them, a war of mutual destruction without a shot being fired. No, that wasn't an option.

Their only option was subterfuge. Let the Kingdom think that Jovian was being soft, allowing some of the rat rebels to live - if the courts decided in their favor - and making peace with them to end the rebellion. It looked as if the foxes were still making the decisions, and...

And it would let something other than monsters rise in the ranks of the rats. It would let those with the ideals of peace, those that could form some sort of cooperation with the foxes, be the next ones that led the way forward. If it worked, then there would be no more need for monsters.

A knock at the door pulled him back from his musings. He turned to face the rat female that stepped through.

"Pardon me, but we found her."

"...Where?"

There was no need to ask which 'her'. There could only be one.

"She's at the gates, Anastus."

"...I'll come down."

Lidochka was dirty, so dirty that her white fur looked as stained and browned as the most common of their species, but her eyes still glinted with the same rage, the same fire that had nearly cost them the rebellion. She waited on the other side of the gates to the mansion, and she gripped the gate bars with a death grip. As he approached, she glared at him, and he knew she'd heard.

"What are you doing?" she hissed.

"The only thing I can."

"No, no, you can't do this! We are so close!"

"The King is mine."

"The King needs to die. And so do all the others. Aeliana, too. You can't trust any foxes."

"You can't trust all rats, either."

"Apparently not," she growled through clenched teeth.

"...There's blood in your fur," he said.

"I stayed busy."

Very busy, if the stains were any indication. It was hard to tell at a distance, but this close, with only the bars between them, he could see which stains were from dirt and which came from blood. She had it all around her jaws and fingers, and there were stains along her sides and hips. She looked like some great monster that had risen from the pits to take its vengeance on the living, and he wondered just how many foxes she had killed with her insane strength and alluring shape.

She leaned through the bars, nearly nose to nose with him.

"You can still fix this. Let me in. If you have any loyalty to your own people...let me in. If you can't do it yourself, then I'll take care of it for you. The way that I took care of everything else you were too scared to touch."

"..."

Anastus nodded at the other rats. The gate opened, but before Lidochka could step through, he gestured at those assembled. His rats lunged for her, grabbing her by the wrists and pulling them behind her back. The albino screamed as she was taken off her feet, falling to the ground as the other rats overwhelmed her.

"What are you doing?!"

"You will stand trial," Anastus said. "There's nothing -"

"Trial?! They'll kill all of us! Every last one of us. They hate us. They hate us!"

As she whipped her head left and right, shouting at the top of her lungs and demanding to be let free, Anastus pushed the gate closed. The streets were clear, and the governor's mansion was far enough from the other well-off fox families that there was little chance that she could be overheard.

He understood it, though, and he wished he didn't. There was a chance that the albino was right and they'd all die. There was always a chance of that.

But the alternative, of wiping out everyone, of not just controlling but actually killing everyone, was too much to bear.

"Take her to the dungeons below and lock her up," Anastus said, the words coming coldly and oddly easily for him. "She'll stand trial the same as me."

"We'll die together, Anastus!" Lidochka shouted as she was pulled to her feet and marched off. "They won't let us live! They won't understand! They'll kill us and bury us, every last rat! You've killed us all! You've doomed us!"

Maybe, but maybe not. He still flinched as she was led off to the underground.

The moon rose, and Anastus had escorted himself to a cell, as well. His rats were surprised, but the way he saw it, he was no better or worse than the other ringleaders, and he deserved to be treated no better or worse than they were. They put him in a cell, took the key, and left him alone.

Not for long, however. Aeliana came to visit halfway through the night, and she sat outside the small chamber. She didn't speak, at first, and he didn't say anything either. It was more a simple moment of existing rather than anything else.

It couldn't last, of course. Eventually, she leaned against the bars and asked:

"Why are you here?"

"I made as many mistakes as the rest. I have to stand trial, too."

"You could avoid it."

"Heh, how?" he asked. "Lidochka knew that I was part of this from the start. Everyone knows I was the first rat to be changed, to rebel. If Florus is still alive, he'd probably give testimony about that."

"You could find a way."

"I could, but I won't. It wouldn't be fair. It wouldn't be right."

"...You're not doing it for that reason, are you?" she asked, leaning closer. "You aren't going through with this to be fair. Do you want to die?"

"No."

At least, he didn't want to commit suicide. He wasn't that buried in shame and guilt, though there were times when it felt like a near thing. Anastus sighed, looking up at the ceiling of his cell. The stones above him had nothing remarkable about them, but they were easier to look at.

"It's not...wanting to die. It's wanting to be told..."

"Told what?"

"That I wasn't wrong. That I had a reason to do what I did. That...somewhere...somehow...I wasn't just a monster."

She looked at him like he was insane, and perhaps on some level he was. Yet, he still wanted to hear it from someone else. Had he gone over the line? Yes. Had he been wrong to start this? Had it all been a big mistake? Had he deluded himself into thinking that anyone had a reason to stand up for themselves?

That was what the court would decide. For all the other rats, it was a matter of whether they were guilty or not, but by judging him, the courts were deciding whether his cause had any merit. If they judged his acts as worth anything short of execution, then they were admitting that he had reason for what he did. Perhaps good, perhaps bad, but reason, and that would answer whether he had gone too far.

Aeliana shook her head, standing up. She turned to leave, paused, then looked back at him.

"I'll let you know when the court convenes."

"Thank you."

"I won't..." She sighed. "You won't accept help, will you?"

"Judge me as I am. That's all I can ask."

"That might be hard."

"We just had a revolution. The easy part's done. Now, the real work starts."

The End

Summary: The King is under Anastus's control. Plans are underway to change things. Not everyone likes the plans.

Tags: No sex, Nudity, Blood, Anger, Fury, Rat, Fox, Plans, Series, Patreon, Prison, Jail Cell, Court,