roseandheather wrote:Oh, God in heaven, can I ever.
Okay. So remember how, back in OBS, His Royal Assness Pavel Young basically did jack shit to help Estelle with - well, anything? How he was politically connected but not particularly good at his job, and how he made her job considerably harder, instead of easier like he was supposed to?
Well, so does Dame Estelle Matsuko.
You have to remember that, until the Monica crisis hit, Khumalo - as much as I love him - had not proven at all gifted with imagination or moral courage. He was a political appointee by the Janacek Admiralty because he was an aristocrat in his own right, a relative of the Queen's, and - critically - a firm member of the Conservative Association.
By this point, we had met Michael Oversteegen, ergo we were aware that not all Conservatives were useless assholes. Dame Estelle had not, and given her prior experience with political appointees - particularly conservative ones - she was already predisposed not to like him. Remember, in OBS she saw Honor Harrington as the exception for Navy officers, not the rule. Honor changed that somewhat, but a lifelong distrust of political Navy officers doesn't go away overnight, and all that old mistrust came roaring back when she ended up with Khumalo, who - remember, again, this was before Monica - appeared to her to be yet another "Conservative Political Appointee Officer, Specimen #906", not "Augustus Khumalo, that guy who rode to Aivars Terekhov's aid without hesitation and told the Monican President to shove it up his ass and the ass of the horse he rode in on."
And Khumalo - darling man! - wasn't helping; he was a Conservative and not shy about it, and managed to open mouth insert foot more than once in diplomatic circles. Dame Estelle was basically thinking, "What in God's name did I do wrong to continually get saddled with conservative officers who make my job harder? Harringtonexceptedofcourse," and he really wasn't doing anything to prove her wrong, because he didn't know he could. Remember, he had been waiting for the White Haven Admiralty to yank him from his post - he'd only been sent there in the first place, after all, because it wasn't supposed to be an important military post. Diplomatic, yes - that's why they sent such a Foreign Office heavy hitter as Dame Estelle - but a Navy presence wasn't thought to be necessary beyond a token. So he was constantly on edge, knowing one wrong move would only hasten his dismissal but dead sure it was coming anyway, as well as knowing that anything that went wrong in the Talbott Quadrant, militarily speaking, was his responsibility, whether he knew about it or not. And so he overcompensated - see the early chapters of Shadow of Saganami.
It's also true that someone's preconceptions of you tends to affect how you yourself behave. If you know everyone thinks you're a mostly useless incompetent, what's to stop you from thinking you're a mostly useless incompetent? That was Khumalo's problem.
But Monica changed everything. When the flag went up at Monica, Khumalo knew he had two choices; he could do the right thing, or he could do the easy (and seemingly career-saving) thing. And in that moment, Augustus Khumalo found his courage. He said, "You know what? I don't give a damn what anyone else thinks of me. I was stationed out here to do a job, and I am by God going to do my job."
In that, Dame Estelle saw echoes of the first Navy officer she'd ever truly respected, and a switch flipped somewhere. Suddenly he wasn't "Conservative Political Appointee Officer, Specimen #906" to her any more - he was a man who had stood up and done what duty demanded of him, even if it would ruin his career, and they both saw him for what he truly was - but what neither of them knew he was until it came down to the most important choice of all.
And that is why Dame Estelle Matsuko disliked Augustus Khumalo, and how they became not only close friends but comrades-in-arms from Monica on.
~*~
