fic | 2

[joinedforces]

ABOUT PRIVILEGE




Of course it’s his mother’s idea to bring in the travelling philosopher, Dia Secura, as Claude’s governess the summer he turns seventeen. It couldn’t be anyone else’s, really. His father thinks the Twi’lek is too young to teach anything of note, and Rainier thinks she’s too hyped to be allowed any impact, even if she isn’t. Too much oxygen, too little hold, he complains.

Claude thinks they both sound old, honestly.

He likes her style. Not just her appearances, though, she’s very pretty with her subtly purple skin and her traditional Ryloth attire, but the way she enters into dialogue with him. She approaches him differently than most. Not like she doesn’t acknowledge his rank, but like she expects that it won’t matter. Not to him, either. Claude appreciates that for some reason he can’t explain.

How she creates a space where he doesn’t have to be “prince”. Where he can be something else. More of himself.

They talk about forms of government, advantages and disadvantages. They talk about equality, inequality, the nature of both things. One day, she sits down at his table and gives him a datapad, for note-keeping, you’ll want to remember this, Claude, in her heavily accented voice. He types in the date and writes, lesson 8.

“Tell me about privilege,” she says.

“Privilege is when a person, institution or nation enjoys advantages that another person, institution or nation doesn’t,” Claude dutifully recites, probably out of some book Rainier’s given him once. Sounds like something he’d give him, factual but removed from reality, academic but impossible to relate to.

“That’s a correct, if very safe definition,” Dia replies, typing something on her own datapad, before turning the screen towards him, showing him the words: real life examples?

It makes him smile, brushing some curls out of his face. She smiles as well, putting the pad down. He writes a couple of notes, then taps his fingers against the tabletop in consideration of the question.

What does he know about real life, really? Kriff, he spends all his waking hours behind tall hedges and thick walls.

His life hasn’t been real since he was born.

A frown. Claude stops the tapping of his fingers and shrugs, a bit apologetically. Sorry, I don’t know, it means, who should have taught me? Across the table, Dia inclines her head, her lekku bobbing a bit, gentle motion like waves. Purple waves. Claude says, “a rich man holds a privilege that a poor man doesn’t by way of his credits.”

Too easy, but it’s all he’s got.

Dia just nods, though. “Can you use yourself as a point of reference?”

Staring at her for a moment, Claude thinks about his life in terms of elements that give him an advantage over others. It’s said that he holds power by way of rank, he’s been born into high status, he’s rich and has servants easing his life every hour of every day. He doesn’t even need to make his own kriffing bed in the morning. It’s not that he can’t see it, how others might perceive him as fortunate, lucky, but that’s because there’s so much they don’t see, right? There’s so much that’s invisible to the eye about being a prince of Paris.

And so, Claude suddenly feels defensive, like it’s actually a necessity to tell her, in words, “it’s not like I don’t have problems.”

Rainier, who definitely counts among Claude’s problems, high up the list, even, would have told him off with a sarcastic attitude, made him feel stupid and foolish. Dia, who is the exact opposite of Rainier in every way, gender, species, standing, just cocks her head at him and types something else on her datapad before turning it back towards him.

It reads: I’m not diminishing your problems, Claude.

From the way she’s looking at him when she puts the pad down, Claude can tell that she really isn’t, too. That she understands. That she’s got eyes in her head and she’s observant by nature. She knows. He blinks and looks down.

“I’m a bad point of reference, I’ve got everything,” he finally responds.

“Maybe that makes you the perfect point of reference,” she tells him, continuing, “imagine that you were a Twi’lek girl, princess of Paris, born to wealth and status. Would your privilege be the same as it is now, when you’re the human Claude, born to those same things?”

More frowning. Claude makes a few notes on his datapad and bites his lower lip briefly, thinking. “I don’t see the difference,” he finally admits, somewhat reluctantly.

Rainier would disapprove, after all.

“The difference is, Claude, that in your current situation, you’re male and you’re human, two things we know to hold higher privilege than being female and of any other species. Twi’lek women are at much higher risk of being enslaved for exploitation than humans females are, not to speak of human males who’re often the perpetrators of that very exploitation and enslavement.”

At one and the same time, when she speaks those words, a chill runs down Claude’s spine while his hackles are also rising, simultaneously. That’s not true! You can’t put it that simply. “Everyone can expect to be treated equally, regardless of gender and species,” he insists. It’s textbook. He’s read it in a thousand of Rainier’s practical guides to politics. It’s the very foundation of the Republic legislation!

“That should be true,” Dia replies, getting slowly up from the table and leaving her datapad behind, screen blank once more. “But is it, truly, beyond the letter of the law?”

However thick the walls are that Claude lives behind and has lived behind for seventeen years, something breaks a hole in them that day. They go on to talk of privilege, not on a horizontal scale, but on a vertical one, Dia and him – and later, Claude recounts it to Rainier who goes on to complain even louder to his father.

The boy’s too impressionable, he says. And the Twi’lek’s hold has gotten too strong. Enough with the oxygen, huh?

There are still three weeks left of summer when Dia is sent on her way, well-paid for her services, but specifically asked not to keep in touch. Claude has learned enough, they say.

While Claude knows, watching her walk up the ramp of her ship, that his learning has only just begun.